Jumper (2008)

Director: Doug Liman                                   Writers: David S. Goyer & Jim Uhls
Film Score: John Powell                               Cinematography: Barry Peterson
Starring: Hayden Christensen, Jamie Bell, Rachel Bilson and Samuel L. Jackson

This film is absolutely maddening. There is nothing worse that watching characters who make stupid, nonsensical choices. You want to grab them by the shirt and smack some sense into them but, no, they go right on being idiots. It’s a shame because the premise had so much potential, and to be honest the film looks great and should have been a huge hit. But when the script has characters behaving like morons, and there’s no one around to tell them to change it . . . it’s absolutely maddening. Jumper began its existence as a young adult novel by Steven Gould, but when it came time to produce a screenplay the studio combined elements of the first three novels in the series and left all of the motivation on the writing room floor. Director Doug Liman should have known better. He directed the first film, The Bourne Identity, in the Bourne franchise and went on to produce the next two. The fact that he didn’t take the screenwriters to task for their glaring omissions is disappointing in the extreme.

The film begins with teenager in school who falls through the ice in a river in Ann Arbor and suddenly teleports to the public library. Once he learns how to control this power he leaves his father, Michael Rooker, and heads out on his own. First stop, robbing a bank. But instead of taking a little money and moving on to the next bank, no, he takes as much as he can carry, which alerts Samuel L. Jackson that there must be a jumper involved. This is only the first of the boneheaded decisions that this character makes. Eight years later he’s Hayden Christensen and he’s living in style, traveling the world, and oblivious that Jackson is onto him. Then we see Jackson capture another jumper with electricity and kill him. Why? We never learn any reason why Jackson is so angry or why he feels he has to kill jumpers. There is simply no explanation. In one of Christensen’s hops he goes to London and visits a bar where Jamie Bell is and Bell knows he a jumper. How? I have no idea. Going through the videotapes at the bank, Jackson is able to trace Christensen back to his apartment and nearly captures him. But Christensen escapes and after taking some time to recover, he goes to find his childhood sweetheart back in his hometown and they plan a trip to Rome together. But when they get there Bell is waiting, along with two of Jackson’s associates called Paladins. And speaking of Paladins, Diane Lane is wasted in a tiny role whose purpose is only to set up a sequel that, mercifully, never came.

Just one example of the moronic choices that Christensen makes is when he goes back to find his girlfriend, Rachel Bilson. She manages to escape from Rome and gets on a plane while Christensen jumps to follow Bell and discovers that the Paladins not only want to kill the jumpers but their families too. And that includes Bilson. Christensen makes his way to her apartment and when he sees Jackson coming up the stairs all he has to do is jump with Bilson somewhere, anywhere, and explain it to her in relative peace. Does he do that? Of course not. He doesn’t want to shock her, I get it, but it’s too late for that. So he dinks around and waits until the last possible second, when Jackson is already through the door, before jumping with her--which he was going to have to do anyway--leaving a hole that Jackson can come through and follow him. And there are a half dozen more similar hesitations that make no sense. Jump already, then figure things out. Unfortunately the screenwriters were trying to manufacture suspense where it didn’t actually exist and ruined what otherwise could have been a very effective film. And I wanted to like the film. It was slick and the effects were great, but unfortunately it was all for nothing. Jumper was a great idea that was worth filming and was unfortunately ruined by a bad screenplay.

The Long Gray Line (1955)

Director: John Ford                                       Writer: Edward Hope
Film Score: George Dunning                          Cinematography: Charles Lawton Jr.
Starring: Tyrone Power, Maureen O’Hara, Donald Crisp and Robert Francis

The Long Gray Line is sentimentalized story of the life of a West Point sergeant. John Ford is at the helm, but even with his gravitas he can’t save it from descending into schmaltz. Tyrone Power isn’t any more convincing with his Irish brogue than Orson Welles was in The Lady from Shanghai. It’s a widescreen Technicolor dud of a film that boasts a ton of character actors but can’t seem to get it’s bloated expectations off the ground. The film is based on the autobiography of Marty Maher, and the title is a reference to the continuation of the tradition at the school and the gray uniforms the cadets wear. Producer Jerry Wald originally planed to make the film at RKO but the studio felt that his price was too high and declined. Wald eventually managed to convince Columbia to purchase the rights and John Ford was brought in to direct. This was Ford’s first film after undergoing eye surgery and it was the first film he shot in CinemaScope. The production also received permission from the school and the exteriors were shot on the West Point campus.

Tyrone Power plays an aging West Point sergeant whom the military wants to retire. In desperation he goes to see President Eisenhower to ask to keep his job. Once there, he tells the story of coming to the U.S. from Ireland in 1905 and working as a busboy in the school chow hall. After falling too far into debt from breaking dishes, he takes his citizenship test and enlists as a cadet. His nemesis in these early days is corporal Peter Graves, but there are plenty of other corny turn-of-the-century cadets like Martin Milner to go around. When he decks Graves, he gets transferred to Ward Bond’s sports outfit and falls in love with an Irish cook, Maureen O’Hara. That is, until he sees her going on a picnic with Graves. It turns out, however, that this was just a ploy by Bond, and when Power proposes she says yes. After a few years O’Hara saves enough money to bring his father, Donald Crip, over from Ireland as well. While Power wants to get out and make his way in the world, circumstances conspire to keep him in West Point for the rest of his career.

Though John Ford’s westerns are some of my favorite films his family dramas, like How Green was my Valley, leave me utterly cold. And this one is no exception. I came to the film through actor Robert Francis, who had been so compelling in The Caine Mutiny. Unfortunately he died in a plane crash after finishing this film. He had been voted one of the screen’s “Promising Personalities” of 1954, but only made four films in his brief career. That alone makes the film worth watching, but little else does. The acting is broad and phony and the characterizations are very one-dimensional. All of the principals seem as if they are on a Broadway stage, yelling their lines and with little actual motivation. Power and O’Hara are Irish stereotypes with absolutely no subtlety. It’s the story of a man who gave his life to an institution, but the audience has absolutely no sense of who he is as an actual man. The Long Gray Line is decidedly not my kind of film but, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, for people who like this sort of film this is the sort of film they will like.