Hayden Christensen plays a young man who can teleport himself to any place on the globe at any moment. He mostly uses this skill to turn the world into his own personal playground, at least until he runs into a government agent (Samuel L. Jackson, in fire and brimstone mode) dedicated to eradicating his kind. Director Doug Liman is after something ambitious here. Jumping from continent to continent in the midst of a single set piece, the picture challenges all of the spatial and temporal assumptions we have about an action movie. More often than not, however, Jumper is too challenging – the jarring switcheroos undermine the film’s pacing rather than enhance it. Instead of feeling revolutionary in a way that the Matrix movies were, Jumper often feels like a badly edited mess.
