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GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 2/13/07)

Slam-bang globe-trotting action gets taken up several notches above the ordinary in Jumper, as its teleporting protagonists refuse to fight fair by jumping anywhere from a few feet to half a world away from their opponents at any given time, sometimes bringing a few toys (such as a brand-new Mercedes) with them. These site-shifting extravaganzas sometimes reach an exhilarating level of near-abstraction. So it's too bad that just about everything surrounding the action scenes of the picture is such unmitigated crap.

Dan Rice (Christensen), sunning himself on top of Egypt's Sphinx, tells the audience, after a recap of his continent-hopping day, that he couldn't always do this — that once upon a time he was "a chump, just like you." (It's not a Doug Liman film — his last was the loathsome Mr. And Mrs. Smith — if it doesn't deliver a veiled, or not-so-veiled, insult to its audience within the first five minutes.) Flash back to gray, cold Michigan, where the young, sensitive, much-mocked Dan, wooing his would-be girl Millie, falls through some ice and gets sucked into a sub-freezing river; this stress causes him to discover his unexplained teleporting powers. Once discovered, they come in handy in escaping his nasty home life, domineered by a brutal father (Rooker) and memories of a mom (Lane) who mysteriously quit the family when Dan was five.

How sensitive l'il Dan transforms into a smirky, insufferable Hayden Christensen is not explained to one's satisfaction, but one infers that access to anything he wanted had something to do with it. Rice's have-a-good-time-all-the-time lifestyle is soon interrupted by Roland, a white-haired tracker of "Jumpers." We soon learn, much to our regret, that Roland is the leader of the "Paladins," a group of religious fanatics whose mission is to hunt and kill Jumpers, because Jumpers have powers only God should have. Also that Paladins and Jumpers have been battling each other since before the Crusades, blah, blah blah. This would-be mythology, some of it apparently improvised by Liman on the set, and some of it I suppose concocted by screenwriters David S. Goyers, Jim Uhls, and Simon Kinberg from Steven Gould's novel, is so dumb it makes the goofy forces-of-light-and-darkness back story of the Night Watch movies feel like Robert Graves' The White Goddess by comparison.