Cynical Cinema

The main problem with Jumper, as it is with most Hayden Christensen movies, is Hayden Christensen.  He is so wooden, he may as well be a totem pole.  Or Steven Seagal.  In this movie his love interest is Rachel Bilson, some girl who is famous from some TV show called The OC.  She is not a great actress, but compared to him she’s Greta Garbo and Meryl Streep rolled into one.  And then there’s Samuel L. Jackson, who will appear in just about anything ever, phoning it in as he does in the bad ones.  And this really is a bad movie.  The story is that Christensen is a “jumper”, some kind of person who can just disappear from where he is and reappear anywhere he likes.  He robs banks with this power, builds something of a playboy lifestyle, until finally he is tracked down by Jackson.  Jackson is a “palladin”, which is an organization?  A species?  A committee?  dedicated to tracking down and killing these “jumpers”.

Christensen escapes the first time, meets another “jumper”, finds out there are others like him, and finally meets his mother, Diane Lane, who abandoned him when he was a five-year-old.  Basically, the last hour of this movie is a cross-dimensional, all-over-the-world chase and escape involving the two jumpers and Jackson and the other palladins.  Which is all well and good, but I’d like a little more story.  Where do these “jumpers” come from?  Why do they exist?  Who are the palladins?  Why do they want to kill the jumpers?  How come the jumpers don’t always know that there are others like them?  Any back story at all would be nice, but there is none.  Zip.  All of this leads to a fairly mundane, inexplicable and silly conclusion after a mundane, inexplicable and silly movie.

But I kind of like it.  In a way, Jumper is delighfully idiotic.  The scenes where buses fly through time and space to emerge in the Arabian desert are insane.  The plot twists and the ideas that characters have and the complete lack of effort from Jackson and Lane are, in a way, hilarious.  The pointless and contrived involvement of Bilson, the unecessary high-school-bully scene, the wannabe heart-rending scenes with Christensen and his father…it all adds up to enough lunacy and idiocy and stupidity to make this movie somehow watchable through it’s mercifully short hour and a half running time.  I can’t say it’s a good movie without feeling a little nauseous, but I can say that you may well enjoy it.

Diane Lane is reason enough to watch just about any movie.  Not only is she a remarkable cougar and gorgeous, she is also a very fine actress who, like most other actresses of her calibre and stature, is forced to take lousy roles from time to time.  There are a few actors who have almost never done truly bad movies.  Tom Hanks springs to mind.  DeNiro, until about eight years ago.  But that is because high-calibre male actors can pick and choose their roles.  High-calibre actresses must take what comes along, even if that is Aeon Flux.  And Untraceable is on a par with that pile of junk.  Lane plays a cop who works at the cyber-crimes department, tracking down internet predators and so forth.  All of a sudden a guy shows up on the net, killing people online based on the number of hits his website receives.  The more hits it gets - the faster the man or woman he’s captured dies.  These deaths are all done with a series of creepy but unnecessarily complicated devices that display his flair for morbid showmanship while simultaneously commenting on society’s depravity. 

 Which is a fairly interesting premise.  The more people watch, the faster the guy dies, and of course more and more people will watch, because society and people are so horrible.  But the big problem with Untraceable is the bizarre disconnect between the cyber crimes unit of the police and the killer.  In fact, the killer ends up targetting that particular police department, for what appears to be…no reason at all!  Why would this guy, who wants to make a point about the evils of society’s depravity, and targets people who profit from that depravity (I hope I’m not giving too much away here - this movie scuks anyway), go after these cops?  Aren’t they the only ones who exist to take down the very people he’s raging against?  Aren’t they, in many ways, on the same side? 

So the only reason he might do so is that the people who made this movie thought it would be more exciting to put the stars in the precarious positions.  Like when CSI does one of those episodes where a member of their team is held prisoner somewhere, or targeted by a kidnapper or something.  And that’s what Untraceable is.  A long, poorly thought-out episode of CSI masquerading as an action movie with an attempt at a message.