.jeri.

I couldn't even talk Ric into seeing this one with me. I'm not sure why I really wanted to see it, but then again, I run out to see Nickelodeon movies some times, so why try to make sense out of my movie tastes?

Anyway, I thought it was probably safest to see this at the cheap theater, just in case, so I had to go see it by myself. Thanks, dear! The highlight of the audience was an older man who looked like stalker potential but ended up falling asleep halfway through the movie and snoring through about 1/4 of the story. Other than that, I've actually been having better luck with audiences at the cheap theater than those at regular ones lately!

Jumper is about a teenager who lives alone with his father and has a crush on a girl at school. He gives her a snowglobe with the Eiffel Tower in it because she wants to travel. When another guy sees it and makes fun of him, throwing the globe onto an ice-covered river, it's not hard to guess that our hero will go after it. When he does, he falls through the ice, and instead of dying, he instinctively teleports himself to his local library. Several years later, after he has honed his talent, he's being tracked by people called Palladins, who think that all Jumpers should die (for religious reasons, of course). He pops back to his home town to pick up the girl he loved, and they fly to Rome, where the adventure begins, including the discovery that there are others of his kind.

The movie stars Hayden Christensen, who shows here as well as in other movies (see: Shattered Glass) that it really was George Lucas's fault that he came across so poorly in Attack of the Clones (say what you will about Revenge of the Sith - I liked it). Jumper doesn't give Christensen much of an acting challenge, but he's at ease in this role, and makes the preposterous plot not seem so preposterous, which I think takes talent. His co-star is Rachel Bilson, who does the best she can with the character she's given - a girl who doesn't seem to question very much when the boy who disappeared under the ice shows up 8 years later with no explanation of how he lived.

The movie obviously has a bit of ridiculousness and some flaws. One bit of ridiculousness is that one of David's favorite places to relax is on a lawn chair on top of the Sphinx. Uhh, that's pretty obvious, with so many tourists around, don't you think? The movie also has a lot of narration at the beginning, but none of it is necessary at all, and it would have been a better movie without it.

But despite the little things, Jumper has a little bit of something to it. The jumping itself is pretty cool. The sound and visual effects are good. The locations are all over the place and interesting (I got to re-live my honeymoon a bit in the Rome sequence). The idea of jumping is well-developed, including wormholes and the idea that a jumper can take people or items with him when he jumps. David's relationship with his father and the story of his mother are more than I would have expected out of a movie like this.

It's a movie that had the potential to be much better, but ended up being pretty good anyway. I'm not saying that it's taking home any prizes, but I had a fun time, and am not sorry that I made a point of going out to see it. It's probably better than some of the blockbusters I'll end up seeing this summer.