There seemed to be a lot of confusion about Jumper going into it: was it based on X-Men or something? Why were there so many Star Wars guys in this? And how did the guy that directed The Bourne Identity and Mr and Mrs Smith get his name attached to this? Or maybe to quote the girl that entered the cinema behind me Saturday night sums things up better: “What is this movie about?” Good question and a fair point, I thought as the next 80-some odd minutes passed before me.

The essential problem with Jumper is that it seems that somewhere in the editing process about half the movie was cut out of the final print. Everything seems so super accelerated with no room for pacing or meditation, which is odd considering that the first 20 minutes of the movie focuses on the preamble. Young David Rice (Max Thieriot) living in Ann Arbor, MI, discovers that he can teleport after a scuffle with a bully that lands him under a frozen lake. Because David’s father (Michael Rooker) is an insufferable bastard in the wake of his mother’s (Diane Lane) abandonment of the family, and with new super powers in hand David runs away from home.

With a ridiculous voice over to sit through (a tactic frequently used as a lazy short hand in modern screenwriting), those first 20 minutes were almost unbearable and they ate up nearly a quarter of the running time. The one thing you can say though is that they got dead on casting for young David because he’s the spitting image of the older David played by Hayden Christensen, right down to the doey-eyed blank stare. “Mr Charisma”, as I like to call Christensen, is a bore. As David he shows no sign of angst or joy or even straightforward apathy in regards to his abilities. That’s right, he can’t even sum up the emotional palate to act disinterested.

If Christensen had been playing against other cardboard cut outs, he would have just faded into the background with the furniture, but here’s the problem: he was acting with humans. The story goes that there have always been “jumpers”, people who could instantaneously transport from one place to another when the concentrate on an image a memory or line of sight. And as long as there have been jumpers there have been the Paladins, a group of pseudo-religious fanatics that hunt and kill jumpers. Their super power is that they can pose as a member of any US Government agency they want.

The head paladin, Roland, is played by uber-badass Samuel L. Jackson, and if there’s one person you don’t want to be acting against when he’s switched on and you have no game it’s Samuel L. Jackson. With silver hair and self-righteous tone, Jackson is gold, but I feel that director Doug Liman had his main man shackled by those same electro-straps that his character captures jumpers in.

The movie also has two other winning elements working in its favour. The first is Rachel Bilson as David’s high school sweetheart Millie. Bilson’s sweet, smart and feisty but her character is strangled by the briefness of the movie as it jumps over all the small moments that would have allowed her to build Millie’s personality further and develop her relationship with David more subtly. Secondly, there’s Jamie Bell as fellow jumper Griffin, and he is so good and buoyant and just otherwise fun to watch that you wish that the film had been about him.

Perhaps that’s because of the nature of the film which comes across more like a highlight reel than an actual film. Roland shows up and David decides that now’s the time to visit all the people he left behind, especially Millie. Well that’s just dumb. Then there’s the whole subplot about David’s mom being a paladin, which you think would be a pretty major plot twist especially when Roland learns of it, but yeah, guess what? It’s never really talked about until the very end of the movie.

These along with so many other missed opportunities really weigh on the finished film. There’s a scene near the beginning where David watches a TV report about a flood somewhere and the reporter says that only a miracle save a group of people. I thought, okay, I see where they’re going. And then when David and Griffin team-up I thought, now watch this, the jumpers are going to organize to fight back. But did any of that come to pass? No, in the end David just keeps on jumpin’ without a care in the world, almost.