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Muddled "Jumper"

Anyone who's flown on an airplane in the last half century has surely dreamt of teleportation. Imagine: no more hours stuck in cramped cabins with kids kicking the back of your seat. No more delays, lost luggage or security strip-searches. The world itself is your backyard; the Eiffel Tower is as near as your living room couch. The possibilities, particularly for a well-executed superhero movie, are limitless. That movie it not "Jumper", director Doug Liman's messy adaptation of the Steven Gould novel. There's definitely potential here; on the surface, "Jumper" could be a good story. But the characters are so uninteresting and the love story so slight and strained that there's little to hold on to except the premise. Over the course of the film, you can literally feel the potential drain off the screen.

When we first meet David Rice (Hayden Christensen), he's standing atop the Sphinx staring mournfully into the Egyptian sunset. An overused voice-over explains how he got there. As is often the case, David wasn't very popular in high school (how come the cool kids never get superpowers?). In an effective opening sequence, David tries to retrieve a gift for his high school crush Millie and winds up falling through the ice on a frozen river. Unable to escape the frigid depths, he manages to teleport himself to a nearby library (bringing a good deal of the river with him, much to the chagrin of the librarians). No sooner does he ask "Did I just teleport?" than he has packed up and left his single-father home (mom left when he was five) and taken up residence in Manhattan. David quickly gets the hang of his power and finds that he can "jump" to any place he can see (or has ever seen). One useful example: the inside of a bank vault. After all, with great power comes great irresponsibility.

Naturally, complications ensue, this time in the form of Samuel L. Jackson sporting a helmet of just-for-the-heck-of-it stark white hair. He plays Roland, who is, depending on when you ask him, part of the NSA, CIA or IRS. In reality, Roland's a Paladin, one of a super-secret group of assassins who hunt and kill "Jumpers" using electrical tethers to "ground" them. Yes, it seems David is not alone; there are other teleporters like him, most notably Griffin (Jamie Bell from "King Kong"), a renegade Jumper who's taken it upon himself to fight the Paladins.

There's a lot of story here and, for a while, a bit of promise in the film. But the script (credited to David S. Goyer, Jim Uhls and Simon Kinberg), perhaps ironically, leaps over any interesting character development, and the dialogue (particularly in the David/Millie scenes) is of the trite, plot-moving variety. When David reappears in Millie's life after eight years, for example, she never once asks, "Hey, what happened after you fell through the ice and were thought dead?" In fact, if I were female, I'd say the Millie character sets the plight of damsels-in-distress back decades. Yes, I get it, David's cute 'n' all, but no woman I know would put up with the kind of evasive non-answers David lays on Millie. Poor Rachel Bilson spends almost all her screentime asking some variation of "David, what's going on?" Not exactly a thoroughly modern Millie.

For his part, Mr. Christensen manages to momentarily erase any trace of his stilted performance from the "Star Wars" prequels with a Detriot-by-way-of-Brooklyn accent and standard-issue pretty-boy haircut. But soon he's back to his old tricks, staring blankly and throwing in pauses for no apparent reason. It's as though he thinks his looks equal charisma. Whether it's the acting or the writing isn't quite clear, but Mr. Christensen's David Rice is simply not a very compelling hero.

Of course, teleportation has been done before, most notably with the transporter on "Star Trek" and the Nightcrawler character from the "X-Men" series. Here it takes centerstage and the special effects are undeniably cool. David's ability to teleport from the sink to the fridge, combined with Mr. Liman's trademark handheld camerawork, make for a frenetic ride. The irony is, for a film that can quite literally go anywhere, "Jumper" never gets off the ground.