When I saw the first teaser trailer I knew I was going to like this movie.
Then I heard about the chops of some of the people behind its production: director Doug Liman made Go & Swingers, Mr & Mrs Smith, and The Bourne Identity.
The writing team includes David Goyer who wrote the Blade movies, Dark City, and Batman Begins, and Jim Uhls who wrote the screenplay for motherfucking Fightclub.
So, chops. I knew I was in for a good thing.
But I was just so goddamn wrong.
Not that there weren’t a few good ideas… I mean, I guess. I liked all the bits with the library. And the Tokyo driving sequence with the stolen Benzo was fun.
But the thing with the bus was cooler on the trailer than in the movie. And the teleport-fighting was much better dealt with in X-Men 2 (that whole sequence with Nightcrawler in the Whitehouse was osome), than it is here in a movie entirely about teleporting and fighting! This movie is awful. It’s childish. And an unrelenting idiocy pervades it, from shortly after the beginning until the end.
It felt like a good writer crafted a few scenes, and then they had some idiot’s second generation idiot teenage son come up with all of the rest of the ideas. And it just didn’t work.
The main character (Hayden Christensen) is entirely unlikeable, only barely coming above the appropriately loathsome bad guy (Sam Jackson with badly dyed hair, phoning it in).
Hayden Christensen shouldn’t be allowed to stand around in any more movies. Just cut him a cheque and tell him to fuck off. He’s done.
If the movie had been about the other Jumper, it would have had a chance. So much potential, but the stupid goddamn stupid stupid fucking stupid.
Just skip it.