Jumper.

"It's impossible for outsiders to know who deserves most of the blame for this dud - its director, Doug Liman, its three screenwriters, its multiple producers or the various studio executives who might have done far too much meddling or not nearly enough," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times.

"Running a trim 88 minutes, Jumper engages in the classic quick-junk tradeoff, its brevity coming part and parcel with painful expository narration that undermines Limans's abilities as a visual storyteller," writes Jesse Hassenger in the L Magazine.

"Jumper would be lame simply on the basis of its under-written characters and slack attitude toward the hero's adventures..., but the lazy regard for David's [Hayden Christensen] moral crisis, or lack thereof, is pitiful," writes Jeremiah Kipp in Slant.

Updated through 2/18.

"As a professional pretentious person, it would be easy to harsh on Jumper," writes Grady Hendrix in the New York Sun. "But if I had to pay for my own tickets, this is exactly the kind of fun little movie I'd want to see on a Friday night."

The "site-shifting extravaganzas sometimes reach an exhilarating level of near-abstraction," concedes Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "So it's too bad that just about everything surrounding the action scenes of the picture is such unmitigated crap."

"Though dazzled by its ultra-modern wizardry and the high gloss of its production values, one can also feel the globalist double standard roiling underneath the adolescent-kid fantasy plot," writes James Hannaham in Salon. "Jumper tells us that Americans fantasize about getting rich by stealing and going everywhere they want without restrictions; that they are materialistic, disrespect foreign antiquities, and remain blind to their own and to world history, not to mention current conflicts (the jumpers spend a moment in Chechnya - you bet they're not off to Iraq); and that they perhaps feel only mildly guilty about any of that. OK - who wants to wait here for the world's response to that message?"

"Doug Liman is no John Woo," notes the Reeler. But Christopher Campbell leaps to Liman's defense at the SpoutBlog.

"Liman's movie candy is philistine, banal and lacks surrealist thrill," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "His sci-fi, quasi-political allegory is like an X-Men or Hulk narrative told from the ass end."

"Jumper is all high concept with little invested in characters or story," writes Kevin Crust in the Los Angeles Times.

For the Boston Phoenix, Bret Michel reports on Jumper's visit to MIT - and then pans the movie.

Update, 2/15: "Jumper is so lame, undernourished in its characterizations, stillborn in its action scenes, that it inevitably leads the idled mind to wondering how this movie got past the pitch stage," writes Time's Richard Corliss.

Jim Emerson, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, finds Jumper "so silly you may find yourself giggling helplessly even as you wish you could magically transport yourself almost anywhere else in the world but where you are, in front of the screen showing it."

"[N]o exciting action can cover the film's profound shallowness and repulsive attitude toward everyone but Christensen," writes Tasha Robinson at the AV Club.

Updates, 2/18: "Jumper is so in sync with the language of modern action movies that it's possible to look past its soullessness and go with the quantum flow," writes New York's David Edelstein.

But it's got the New Yorker's Anthony Lane wishing James Cameron would come back.

"Jumper is the kind of movie that formerly defined the direct-to-video market," writes Robert Humanick at the House Next Door. "It barely interacts with itself, let alone the viewer. As far as falling trees go, even the forest animals wouldn’t pay attention to this one."

"I've absolutely no quarrel with mindless action movies (Vin Diesel's The Fast and the Furious and Ahh-nold's Terminator 2 are among my guilty pleasures), but there are imperatives to action - tension, suspense, believability - which Jumper director Doug Liman sorely lacks," writes Flickhead. "Upon leaving the theatre, Mrs Flickhead gave her review: 'That was the worst movie I've ever seen.'"

Posted by dwhudson at February 14, 2008 2:13 PM