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Jumper
20th Century Fox

Jumper reviews
Critic Score
Metascore: 35 Metascore out of 100
User Score  
5.2 out of 10
based on 36 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
based on 149 votes
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MPAA RATING: PG-13 for sequences of intense action violence, some language and brief sexuality

Starring Hayden Christensen, Samuel L. Jackson, Rachel Bilson, Jamie Bell, Max Thieriot, Shawn Roberts, and AnnaSophia Robb

The science fiction thriller leaps into a new realm with Jumper, which begins the epic adventures of a man who discovers that he possesses the exhilarating ability to instantly teleport anywhere in the world he can imagine. From New York to Tokyo and from the ruins of Rome to the heart of the Saharan desert, anywhere is possible for David Rice. That is until he begins to see that his freedom is not total and that he's not alone. Instead, he is part of an ongoing, global war that threatens the very survival of his rare and extraordinary kind. (20th Century Fox)


GENRE(S): Adventure  |  Drama  |  Sci-fi  |  Suspense/Thriller  
WRITTEN BY: David S. Goyer
Simon Kinberg
 
DIRECTED BY: Doug Liman  
RELEASE DATE: DVD: June 10, 2008 
Theatrical: February 14, 2008 
RUNNING TIME: 88 minutes, Color 
ORIGIN: USA 

What The Critics Said

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

67
Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
It may be mindless and sexless and humorless, but Jumper jumps.
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63
ReelViews James Berardinelli
Liman applies the same frenetic approach to action scenes that made "The Bourne Identity" such an engaging and exciting affair.
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60
Empire Olly Richards
It’s Liman’s least charismatic action movie and the least developed, but it still packs some cracking action into its brief running time and lays foundations on which a great franchise could be built.
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58
Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
I'll say this much for Jumper – it's got a great premise. Or at least the beginnings of a premise.
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50
LA Weekly Scott Foundas
It's a feature-length teaser for a never-to-be sci-fi franchise.
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50
Film Threat Stina Chyn
The major weakness in Jumper is the piling on of action and narrative in the last ten to twelve minutes. It's as though the editor was rushing to meet a deadline and did the best he could with too much footage.
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50
Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach
There's enough kinetic energy in Jumper to light a thousand houses. Unfortunately, there's no one home in any of them.
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50
Boston Globe Wesley Morris
But what can you do with Hayden Christensen? He's as close as we have to an android actor. It's all a chore for him. He never looks sufficiently scared, impressed, or surprised by any of this.
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50
Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey
Fast is a good quality in an action/adventure. But there is lightning-paced and then there is warp speed. Doug Liman's Jumper is the latter, a not-so-good quality in an action/adventure for the simple reason that the audience can't figure out what's going on.
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50
Washington Post Ann Hornaday
It's difficult to know whom to root for.
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50
Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov
The whole production does reek a bit of origin story filminess, but even so, it's light sabers beyond Christensen's sad, revengeful fate in "Episode III" and does offer a nice view of the top of the Sphinx's head no less than three times.
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50
Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
The best thing -- maybe the only good thing -- about the expensive sci-fi movie, Jumper, is its high-concept premise, which gives its hero the power of teleporting himself anywhere on the globe in the blink of an eye: from the Coliseum of Rome to the North Pole.
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50
Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
Liman, for all his craft, doesn't have enough FUN with the premise.
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50
San Francisco Chronicle Walter Addiego
Goes south as a sci-fi film.
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50
The Hollywood Reporter Michael Rechtshaffen
Jumper proves disappointingly inert. All the state-of-the-art visual effects in the world can't compensate for spotty plotting and bland characters that prevent an intriguing premise from going the distance.
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50
Variety Brian Lowry
Director Doug Liman churns out a serviceable sci-fi thriller/videogame template that plays like "The Matrix Lite" and, finally, isn't nearly as cool as its trailer.
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50
TV Guide Maitland McDonagh
The film LOOKS great, but at a brisk 88 minutes, there's no time to fill in back story, from the epic history of paladin persecution to the deeply personal mystery of David's mother, and the cliffhanger ending is so abrupt that the movie seems bizarrely truncated.
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50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen
Woefully short on script, the picture ends up disappearing down the wormhole of its own premise.
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50
USA Today Claudia Puig
It doesn't help that the performances are bland (particularly those of Christensen and Bilson) and that what comes out of their mouths is uninspired. Short on imagination and anchored by a wan hero, Jumper is a flight of fancy that never fully takes off.
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50
Salon.com James Hannaham
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. 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.
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50
Los Angeles Times Kevin Crust
Jumper is all high concept with little invested in characters or story.
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42
The Onion (A.V. Club) Tasha Robinson
No exciting action can cover the film's profound shallowness and repulsive attitude toward everyone but Christensen.
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38
New York Daily News Jack Mathews
Deep into Hollywood's Dumb Season comes one of its dumbest offerings.
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38
Premiere Glenn Kenny
These site-shifting extravaganzas sometimes reach an exhilarating level of near-abstraction. So it's too bad that just about everything surrounding the action scenes of the picture is such unmitigated cr--.
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38
Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman
Director Doug Liman and a trio of writers eventually forget the rules they set up and hurl combatants to places they could never have seen or even known about: Who'd willingly project himself into the middle of a Chechnyan war zone?
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38
Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
Jumper, the film, goes everywhere and nowhere.
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30
The New York Times Manohla Dargis
A barely coherent genre mishmash.
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30
Chicago Reader J.R. Jones
Like so many other CGI behemoths, this dull action fantasy ultimately squashes rather than inspires one's sense of wonder.
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30
Slate Dana Stevens
Jumper not only makes the rules up as it goes along; it neglects to tell us what those rules are, which is both unfair and unfun.
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30
New York Magazine David Edelstein
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.
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30
The New Yorker Anthony Lane
The result is more or less a remake of the great scene in “Sherlock Jr.,” where a dozing Buster Keaton dreams himself through a shuffled sequence of backgrounds. Jumper is ten times as brutal, maybe a thousand times more costly, and eighty-four years late, but it’s a start.
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30
Time Richard Corliss
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.
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25
Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
The best stuff in Jumper comes early, while the movie is still busy explaining its scenario. It's only when all the pieces are in place and the story actually kicks in that things start to fall apart, and quickly.
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25
Rolling Stone Peter Travers
Talk about disappointing. Director Doug Liman exuded style and cool in "Swingers," "Go" and "The Bourne Identity." He lost his way in the star bloat of "Mr. and Mrs. Smith," and now his mojo is buried in this amped-up sci-fi chase flick.
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25
New York Post Lou Lumenick
A totally ridiculous and incoherent sci-fi adventure.
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0
Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
Jumper, based on the novel by Steven Gould, re-defines -- downward -- the notion of dreadful. It does so by dispensing with everything a movie needs for a shot at being merely awful. Dramatic development? None. Entertaining dialogue? Ditto. Internal logic? Puhleez. Intriguing characters? No characters, thus no intrigue. Interesting performances? Essentially none, though with an asterisk.
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What Our Users Said

Vote Now!The average user rating for this movie is 5.2 (out of 10) based on 149 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Mitch A. gave it a3:
Though I must admit it is valuable as a thrill ride, Jumper doesn't even feel like a complete movie. Nothing is horribly wrong, but the combination of frustrating acting and a story that plodded along to an 'end' before any development could happen restricts this film from being worth the short time it takes to watch it.

Devon C. gave it a5:
It's a movie to like and enjoy with it's extraordinary design and brain-free fun. But it still falls real short on being a pathetically dumb movie.

Eric G. gave it a4:
It was like, the movie where everything makes sense but you still expect more thinking/reasoning from the characters. Everything in it spelled out the word shallow: Characters, plot, development, even the twist at the end wasn't needed (the one during the last like, 2 minutes). Good concept, terrible way of flowing with it.

Sam gave it a3:
I hate the fact that a majority of my friends liked this movie. Just the worst piece of crap ever. The jumping looked neat, but that is the only passable part.

Deadlock gave it a7:
It was a show full of an actual interesting concept and lots of eye candy. Could use some story building, but was always fascinating.

Kevin C. gave it a3:
Initial concept was good. At first I thought this could be a good foundation for a sequel then I finished the movie. Nothing else needed to be said. Disappointed.

Lev S. gave it a1:
I've watched it. I cannot unwatch it. What a shame. I wonder if Liman got the job by saying, "The locations are all over the world. I've filmed all over the world (Bourne Identity). Give me the gig." What a hack.

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