Follow the lights

It’s not as if Hayden Christensen is incapable of delivering a competent performance. He was more than adequate in the excellent drama Shattered Glass. But he comes across as a performer who needs a good director to draw a decent performance out of him.

Unfortunately, it seems as if the only directors he gets hooked up with are more concerned about playing with the toys rather than dealing with the actors.

Jumper is not particularly bad, but it is one of those movies during which you have to turn off the brain and watch the pretty lights.

Here, Christensen is a Jumper, a young dude who’s found he has some genetic glitch that allows him to jump from one location to another. It’s sort of handy and it saves his life as a young boy, as he avoids drowning and finds himself in a library.

After bailing from an abusive home and setting himself with funds derived from doing the types of things that a lot of folks would do if they found themselves with his convenient talent, he finds others who have the same power. And that there’s a group led by Samuel L. Jackson that’s hell-bent on wiping out these trespassers because, well … it’s never really clear. They want to eradicate the Jumpers because that’s what the script needs to bridge the action sequences.

There’s a lot that is not clear here. But things blow up and the editing is flashy, so you don’t have to be bothered with thinking if you don’t want to. And you don’t want to, because otherwise this silly mess might give you a migraine.