DOUG Liman’s “Jumper” takes an intriguing premise – a guy who can teleport himself anywhere, anytime – and turns it into a totally ridiculous and incoherent sci-fi adventure.
Hayden Christensen is at his most wooden since the “Star Wars” movies as David, a Wisconsin teenager who discovers his gift when a fall into an icy pond suddenly lands him straight in the local library.
Straightaway, he flees to the Big Apple, where he teleports himself in and out of bank vaults with millions of dollars. How he’s able to buy a huge Manhattan apartment entirely with cash is the first of many unexplained mysteries.
It’s eight years later, and Samuel L. Jackson shows up with strange white hair claiming to be a representative of a federal agency.
His character, Roland, actually belongs to the Paladins, a quasi-religious group devoted to wiping out those who share David’s teleportation powers, the Jumpers.
The Paladins were responsible for the Inquisition and the Salem witch trials, David is informed by another Jumper named Griffin (Jamie Bell of “Billy Elliot,” who is considerably more animated than Christensen). Oh.
By this point, David has inexplicably fled home to Michigan – where NY1 is mysteriously playing continuously on his dad’s TV – and suddenly remembered that he’s in love with Millie (Rachel Bilson).
David takes Millie on an airplane to Rome – somehow his buying a ticket with cash goes unnoticed by the TSA – where they tour the Colosseum and meet up with Griffin and a band of Paladins who are apparently on 24-hour alert around the world.
This is where the movie, which seems to be making up the rules of teleportation as it goes along, totally lost me.
The rest is essentially a badly edited, hourlong chase sequence with some of the cheesiest special effects seen in a major studio release of late.
Even funnier is Jackson, in major paycheck mode, trying to stop David from teleporting by using what looks like aerosol spray and a room dehumidifier – and dodging a CGI’s London double-decker bus that Griffin has “jumped” at him.
Diane Lane, who apparently also needed the gig, pops up from time to time as David’s mom. At the totally baffling climax to “Jumper” he asks her, “What now then?” Excellent question.
JUMPER
Where do we go from here?
Running time: 88 minutes. Rated PG-13 (intense action violence, mild profanity and sexuality). At the 19th St. East, the Battery Park City, the First and 62nd, others.