Jumper-Can’t Tell The Players Without a Scorecard

Jumper is a visual stunning film-so much so that it is only after you leave the theater that you stop and ask yourself what it was about. We have a hero who can instantly transport to anywhere on earth-so long as he has been there before.

Or at least, that seems to be the way it works in Jumper. Or maybe he can jump anywhere he sees a photo of. Or maybe he can jump to Oz if he gets a really good image of The Emerald City. No, it seems that he has to travel to the locales that he will later jump to. It is never really made clear, though it does seem to be a bit important to the story.

Our hero is a Jumper, who made his first jump when he was either five or fifteen years old. He is either a hero or a criminal with no conscious. His mother is either a Jumper or a member of the Paladins who have sworn to kill all Jumpers. There are a lot of really cool special effects in Jumper-so try not to worry too much about the story not making any damned sense at all.

Our Hero leaves notes in the banks he robs that says he will pay them back someday, but then there doesn’t seem to be any real world use for instantaneous travel. If you can see into the future, you can make money in the stock market. If you can turn base metal into gold you can sell it, at least until the bottom falls out of the gold market. If you can make it rain, you can get paid to travel to places with droughts. But traveling really fast-nothing really springs to mind as to how you would make legal money with this trick. Unless he started his own UPS or FedEx-but that seems a bit too much work for our boy. It was a very good looking movie.

We only see three Jumpers, and hear the tale of one more-with the exception of his mother, who may or may not be a Jumper. She shows up in Rome when she has no business that we know of being in Rome. There are a lot of Paladins, or at least, they tell us there are a lot of Paladins. We are also told that they have been killing Jumpers for a few hundred years and that they hate them for what they can do-and that they all turn bad in the end. In short, we are left with nothing but questions from the storyline.

But damn, this was a good looking film.


Published by Jon Herrera

Writer, Photographer, Blogger.

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