Mirela dragged me to the movies with her and Enrique tonight but we couldn’t decide what to watch: Juno, Jumper or the new National Treasure sequel. It was decided finally by Mirela, when saw the cute pic of Hayden Christensen in the movie guide, that we would go see Jumper (though once the movie started she thought we were actually seeing Juno!)

So the premise behind the movie Jumper is that a strange genetic mutation allows certain people to be able to jump to any spot in the world just be visualising or thinking about it. Of course such power cannot go unhindered and where there is one force there is another and equal opposite force – out to stop these people jumping are the Paladins – crusaders for the Church.

We don’t get to meet too many jumpers – one we see brutally killed and then we have Hayden Christensen’s jumper who, as the main lead, is unfortunately selfish, stalkerish, dumb, unresourceful and just plain immature. His counter-point was a jumper called Griffin played by Billy Elliot’s Jamie Bell who, seemingly the only one worth rooting for, was screwed over by Hayden Christensen’s character in the end. On the Paladin side – Samuel L. Jackson leads some Matrix-esque baddies on this quest to murder all the jumpers. As Roland Samuel L. Jackson is self-righteous, vicious, unrepentant and I definitely did not like his style.

So, if there is no one to like in the movie, surely in this sci-fi movie at least we should have seen some special effects? Nope. Given the opportunity for imagination the special effects were pretty darn non-existent. Except for sweeping views of well known world cities (New York, Tokyo, London, Egypt), which were the only thing worth seeing in the movie, there was nothing special about the effects.

For such an interesting premise there was great potential for the movie to be quite engaging. Unfortunately it wasn’t. The characters were unappealing, the storyline was weak and the special effects were pretty minimal. Go see it if you want to see a flashing post-card of some of the most gorgeous sites in the world. Otherwise save your money.