Sci Fi Through Space/Time: Push

It's a testament to the success and widespread acceptance of the superhero genre in recent years that David Bourla and Paul McGuigan's Push has been derided as a second-rate superhero movie and not a second-rate rip-off of Scanners and The Fury. To be honest the idea of a group of psychic-powered individuals hiding in plain sight from dubious governmental agencies certainly is a staple of superhero stories, but this feels more like the kind of thing Stephen King touched on in Firestarter, Carrie, or The Dead Zone. The major difference is that now we are able to leapfrog past the long set-ups of those late 70s / early 80s stories - as we already accept the conventions of this sub-sub-genre through over-exposure - and can instead tell stories with large and complicated mythologies. A billion comics, usually in lower-tier comic universes separate from the big two of Marvel and DC, have taken this approach, and now we see it in a brand new potential franchise.


The question is, have Bourla and McGuigan brought something new to the table to justify investment in that potential franchise, or will this fade into the background like some Hong-Kong-based Misfits of Science? The backstory, blasted through in hyper-exposition-mode during an inventively created title montage, sets out a humdrum universe of scientific experimentation into creating psychic soldiers, based on Nazi research during the war. The powered types can be divided into different groups based on their powers. From what I can remember, Pushers are able to manipulate people's minds (though not read them), Watchers can see the future, Sniffs have a kind of psychometric power that regrettably manifests only when they sniff objects (there's no way to make the act of intensely smelling something look anything less than stupid), Stitches can manipulate living tissue, Shadows are able to hide powered individuals just by hanging around them, and Bleeders have a scream that can demolish things (and makes their eyes go lizardy for no apparent reason). Thankfully most of this info is revealed as we go along, interspersed throughout the mostly dreary back-and-forth of much of the movie's running time. Here is a list of them if you're desperate to know more.


All of this is surface dressing on a predictable story about psychics on the run from the evil government psychic division, known as Division (not to be confused with the inept bureaucratic jerks in 24, also known as Division). This sort of thing has been done before, and I have to admit, I've been in two minds about seeing Push for exactly that reason, and not because it looks like Jumper, as pointed out by Masticator. That, too, had the plot of powered individuals chased by shady operatives of a mysterious organisation, which just goes to show that it is a very appealing kind of story on a deep level. Who hasn't fantasised that they are somehow special, and yet misunderstood and persecuted by a force greater than themselves? (Please don't tell me that's just me and a lot of Matrix fans!)


Luckily, Push has more up its sleeve than just having a bunch of photogenic people with Amazing Powers of the Brain trying to elude The Man. Those photogenic people with Amazing Powers of the Brain are also trying to elude a power-crazed Chinese gang who also have Amazing Powers of the Brain. The film tends to get rather busy with the powered people a la Heroes, though sadly we don't get those powers used willy-nilly as in Jumper.

Our hero, Nick, played by Chris Evans, is a loser whose psychic powers (he's a telekinetic, or Mover) have done nothing to stop him being a jerkoff dropout living in Hong Kong and getting into trouble with gambling debts, as people do in the movies (though they don't usually look as hott as Chris Evans). His loser status is attributed to the trauma of seeing his psychic father murdered by a dastardly member of Division played by Djimon Hounsou, wearing an evil goatee. Haunted by relentless Flashback Syndrome in times of great stress, Nick is a burnout, and to make things worse, his Amazing Powers of the Brain are actually very Mediocre.


Into his life comes Cassie, played by a pubescent Dakota Fanning wearing punkish gear and a skirt so short Canyon exclaimed in horror upon seeing the trailer. It fits the character, weirdly. She's older than her years, bossing people about and getting hammered on cheap booze to "improve her powers", though really she's just being a brat. Her past is also filled with that screenwriting staple of emotional pain caused by the fate of her parent, this time her super-Watcher mother, a woman of immense power who has been captured by Division.


Eager to save her, Fanning enlists the help of Evans in the search for Kira, a Pusher played by Camilla Belle (winner of 2008's prestigious Caruso Award for Most Improbably Styled Hair as well as a Worst Actress Dishonourable Mention, thanks to her mystifyingly poor performance in 10000 B.C.). Belle is on the run from Division after absconding with a MacGuffin; a syringe filled with a drug that causes Amazing Powers of the Brain, as well as Not So Amazing Side Effects of the Death, except in certain arbitrarily determined circumstances.

In order to prevail against the machinations of Division, Evans and Fanning enlist the help of various other psychics dotted about Hong Kong. Cliff Curtis, Ming Na, and Nate Mooney (as a nine-fingered sleaze called Pinky Stein) get dragged into the proceedings with varying degrees of enthusiasm. This sadly does not mean we get to see a lot of exciting action, but then the movie has other ideas on its mind. We also don't see the psychics here use their powers to help people, which I've banged on about before. Okay, so I'd argue this doesn't really count as a superhero movie, so these guys have no real narrative obligation to do it, but any conversations within the film about stopping Division from creating an army of super-soldiers seem even more feeble than usual when the two main characters are more interested in gaining some kind of leverage over Division in order to settle their old scores / parental issues.


Okay, sorry, bugbear rant over. As I was saying, in addition to the cliched shady operative antagonists, our heroes also have to contend with a ruthless clan of cliched Chinese gangsters who are desperately seeking the MacGuffin. The number of confrontations between good and bad guys is minimal, which is probably down to the low budget (about $38m; it looks fantastic for the money), and is thus understandable. Instead, for the most part Push features our photogenic heroes meeting a variety of powered people to find other powered people who will help them find their MacGuffin in order to something something. One of the posters for this movie shows someone using telekinesis to blast a car into the air. Trust me, no cars get blown into the air. There are lots and lots of sarcastic conversations, but that's a little harder to dramatise in a poster. Also, who wants to watch a film like that? Other than me, obviously.


There are a couple of action sequences, but sadly they're cut with such a shockingly poor understanding of how editing should work that I silently raged in my seat. McGuigan does such a piss-poor job of cutting these sequences that he makes Quantum of Solace look like it was directed by Tarkovsky. Any joy I might have had at the sight of faceless goons getting thrown through the air with telekinesis was totally scuppered. This scene, from the big finale, is cut and shot so unclearly that you can't tell who is getting hurt, and how. Are the light FX denoting energy in the punches, or deflections? I've watched it a number of times and I just don't know what the hell is going on. I do know it looks as goofy as hell, though.


What does set Push apart is that it evolves into a peculiar hybrid of the usual psychic runaway blah blah as described above, and stern Ocean's Eleven-style con job japery. Again, this is very hard to communicate through trailers and posters, and so I was taken aback as the final half of the movie becomes a chaotic and barely logical series of tricks, counter-tricks, and final act twists, except here the con is complicated by the various superpowers of all the major players. And believe me, when I say complicated, I really really mean complicated.

Complicated is fine if the con has been worked out properly, but regrettably the con makes very little sense. Our heroes -- who, in a nice touch, are not all that great a bunch of psychics compared to the professionals -- need to get hold of the MacGuffin, but not only do they need to figure out where it is, they also have to do so without alerting the various Watchers who are monitoring the future for signs of alteration. The precognition powers are the ones given the most attention and exposition, which was gratifying. Most tales featuring precognition tend to fudge the details of how such powers would affect the actions of everyone involved, or get tangled up in messy continuity. For the most part, Push gets it right, setting out some solid ground rules early on, and sticking to them for much of the film.


Especially interesting is Fanning's explanation of how the future is so malleable even talking about her predictions can often change the future again. So often people hear about their destiny and either do nothing about it, or make it come true through their attempts to avoid it (a million bad stories have ended that way). Push at least accepts that the future is not set in stone, which creates new storytelling opportunities, as every move they make changes something in the future, until at some point they seem doomed thanks to the intervention of a super-Watcher, a Chinese gang-member who apparently has no name, if IMDb and Wikipedia are anything to go by.

This Watcher, focused only on our band of sarcastic heroes, is predicting every move they make, so they have no hope of changing their destiny. Bourla has decided that the future actions of a person can be deduced as soon as they make a decision to do something. It's as if their precognition is linked to some kind of telepathy. It's this conceit that allows Evans to come up with his too-complicated con plot, which involves giving sealed instructions to his group of psychics and then getting his memory wiped so as to confound The Pop Girl (seriously, that's what she seems to be known as). As no one knows what they are going to do right up until the moment they are going to do it, The Pop Girl can't predict what is going to happen.


That's a pretty cool idea, and seems to make some kind of sense within the parameters set out earlier (as well as making the most of the heroes' ingenuity in the face of superior brainpower), but the execution is confusing. Evans' mind gets wiped after three of the envelopes are opened, which seems to contradict those rules. Even weirder, The Pop Girl is already sketching her vision of the future when this happens, and then makes a big fuss about losing that image.


What, she can't remember what she was drawing two seconds earlier? I guess that's the downfall of this new sub-sub-sub-genre; cons work fine onscreen when it's all crafty hand-offs, rigged props, and Matt Damon in a fake nose. As soon as you bring metaphysics into the equation, that flow of set-up / con / "prestige" falls apart.

There's also a lack of rigour to it, especially as the twists and deus ex machina of the final act start happening. One is kinda clever: Fanning is saved from the death she has been predicting since the start of the movie by the intervention of the creepy brainsuck guy who has been hovering around in the background for a while. He has been hired by Fanning's mother, who has seen so far into the future that she can maneouvre people into place years in advance. It's a cute twist, though having an offscreen character influence the plot in such an extreme way inevitably feels like a cheat, no matter how well it has been set up.


There is also a lot of back and forth between Evans, Belle, and Hounsou about whether Belle was his former girlfriend or a sleeper agent from Division that goes through several complicated twists, all of which contradict each other. The only way the final scene could possibly work is if you fanwank like crazy, assuming that Fanning's previous vague predictions were suddenly incredibly precise, or Evans' written instructions to Belle were very complex and called for her to Push Hounsou the moment she meets him, though even that would require yet more contrivance and fanwanking.

That final scene seemed very clever when I first saw it, but by the time I had returned home it had started to fall apart with even a tiny bit of scrutiny. Much of the rest of the film seemed hollow too, suggesting the script wasn't thought through enough during writing, and the filmmakers figured no one would notice, or there were reshoots and rewrites that rendered some of those twists incomprehensible. It's a shame, because the idea of creating a movie like this is very appealing. Yes, I like to see psychic action scenes, but this felt like there was a fresh idea trying to break out from all of the intense concentrating, elaborate gesturing, and eye-morphing effects.


It wasn't all bad, though. Chris Evans has long been a favourite in our house, thanks to his pitch-perfect work on the otherwise risible Fantastic Four movies, as well as his charming performance in Cellular and his intense grouchiness in Sunshine. Watching him turn up in forgettable dreck like The Nanny Diaries (as, I swear to God, Harvard Hottie) has been dispiriting, and then appearing in an underpromoted action film like Push makes things worse. When is he going to hit big? Does anyone else even care? His Wikipedia page hasn't even been updated with the news that he's going to be playing one of the evil ex-boyfriends in Edgar Wright's adaptation of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. Am I going to have to join to update the damn thing myself? I could be Keeper of the Flame, I guess.

He's predictably terrific in Push, playing a stock character (the lovable and acerbic loser) with much charm and conviction. Even better, he's paired up with Fanning, who does a great job as the old-beyond-her-years Cassie. Plagued with visions of her own death, she's a nihilist and alcoholic 13-year old who sasses everyone. I gather I'm supposed to dislike her because she's precocious, and yes, I usually have a problem with child actors, but I thought she was one of the best things about War of the Worlds, and the same thing applies here. Her chemistry with Evans is one of the things I enjoyed the most about Push, their snarky paranoia tempered by growing affection and concern.


Much of the supporting cast are entertaining too. Cliff Curtis can be variable, depending on the movie he is in. I was deeply disappointed by his work in Fracture and Die Hard 4, but he was great in Three Kings and Sunshine. Here he's light and charming, which is a nice departure from his more serious roles. Nate Mooney, as Pinky, is also very likable, and won over the group of teenage girls sitting at the back of the cinema when I saw it. Everything he said was greeted with a delighted cackle. Ming Na gets little to do other than be cynical about everything, which was a bit of a waste. Hounsou glowers a lot. There's not much else for him to do, I guess.


In an improvement on her performance in 10000 B.C., Belle adds a third expression to her repertoire. As with the caveman movie she has happy and scared down-pat, but now she has intense focus mastered too. At this rate, she'll be a watchable actress in about 30 movies. She was recently featured in a Glamour magazine photoshoot of up-and-coming talent pretending to be icons of fashion and female empowerment, for which she should thank her publicist with diamonds and unicorns and suchlike. Nothing she has done on film to date has warranted any attention. Maybe there are hidden depths there, but they are really really well hidden so far.


(N.B. I appreciate that picking on Belle for being out of place in that photoshoot is a bit rich, as the equally micro-talented Hayden Panettierre, Alexis Bledel, and Odette Yustman are also in there too. Basically, except for the inclusion of America Ferrera, the whole thing is an embarrassment.)


McGuigan may fluff the action scenes, but there is other stuff to enjoy there. The Hong Kong location shooting is interesting, only occasionally succumbing to the temptation to postcarditise the city. I also liked his use of pastel colours. It's possible he did that annoying thing of using colours like this because that's what comics do (seriously, only Warren Beatty made that work in Dick Tracy, and only because he went all-out), but nevertheless, it made my eyes very happy. The annoying flashy over-editing irked, though, and not just in the action scenes. At times it feels like Slumdog Millionaire, if Slumdog was about psychics and not implausible fairytale gamepieces.


One decision he has made doesn't work as well as he would have hoped. Turning his back on digital effects (except for where they are necessary), McGuigan fills the screen with physical effects, with the powers having a visceral effect. When people are being thrown around using wirework, that decision pays off, but a floaty gunfight between Evans and Hounsou's Mover right-hand man (played with silent scowly menace by Neil Jackson) rapidly become ridiculous. Seeing two guns hover through the air, obviously stuck to the end of green sticks removed in post, is unintentionally hilarious. Seeing one gun pressed against Hounsou's temple totally broke the spell. I didn't bother to check the credits to see if there was a gun-pole wrangler, as his/her work was terribly unconvincing.


So is it worth watching? As a rental, maybe so, even though that labyrinthine plot is contrived and filled with illogicalities, and the finale hints at future installments that will almost certainly not happen (even with a small budget, it's not going to make a profit, unless there was an amazing deal made for post-theatrical rights). Considering the interesting additions made to the stock plot, it still feels humdrum, and would only really appeal to fans of Chris Evans, psychic-story completists, and people who enjoy seeing things fly through the air because some guy is gesturing like someone infected with Ultra-Vogue Fever. So that's probably just me and three excitable girls who liked Pinky. I will say that even though Franklyn was an underdog film with lots of ambition, I got more out of this psych-heist flick, though again that's mainly because I get a thrill from this kind of thing. Nevertheless, I'm not going to lie to myself and everyone else and act like it's a good movie. It's not even as good as Jumper. I can imagine that anyone reading this it not about to rush out and rent it now. Oh, Chris Evans! Forgive me!

Hancock Defeated By Wuxi Finger Hold And Awesomeness

I was really really rooting for Hancock. Shades of Caruso loves Peter Berg, and wants his movies to make enough money that he can salvage the many box office disappointments from his back catalogue. We also wanted Hancock to be good enough to silence the doubters who have been complaining about it since it was announced, and, possibly most of all, wanted to see Will Smith being generally excellent. Well, it's made a boatload of money (and its overseas gross is big too), and Will Smith was great, but his performance was not what we expected. In fact, the film is not what anyone would have expected, and for that, we have to blame the marketers for making this look like a funny film about a self-loathing superhero when it mostly isn't, and also we need to point a finger at writers Vincent Ngo and X-Files ace Vince Gilligan, and director Peter Berg, for not knowing how to make the material they had work.

I'll go into details after the spoiler marker, but consider this my capsule review. John Dykstra's effects are pretty undistinguished and messy. Berg's decision to film this the same way he filmed Friday Night Lights and The Kingdom might have made some sense thematically, but it's a horribly ugly film with a sickeningly grey palette that made my head hurt (not helped by seeing the jawdroppingly beautiful Kung Fu Panda first).


I didn't totally hate it, though. The three leads are great, which is a big deal for me as I'm not a fan of Charlize Theron but was impressed by her in this (Canyon was less impressed). Jason Bateman is so likeable in this he steals the film, adds a lot of emotion that would otherwise be lacking, and though he at first seems to be nothing more than Michael Bluth after marrying Rita, comes good in the otherwise frustrating final act. His dramatic role in The Kingdom was no fluke, it seems. Will Smith comes out okay too, and the box office gross suggests we are still on our way to renaming the next thousand years the Willennium. That said, in terms of his career, he just made his Golden Child, or Far and Away. I hope his next project is a 100% success. FYI, I will never apologise for being a Will Smith fan. Get used to it.

Even better than those little pleasures, my personal superhero movie bugbear didn't come into play; Hancock might start the film as an asshole, but he is really a hero, a proper hero who helps people and doesn't just fight supervillains with whom he has a personal connection. One of the main themes of the movie is about wanting to do the right thing even though it doesn't seem to be worthwhile. That character trait really pleased me, and made up for a lot of the unfocused events in the latter half of the movie.


Anyway, time to carp. Kung Fu Panda praise follows later.

--------------Hancock spoilers follow-------------

The biggest problem in Hancock is the mid-movie twist, which, after we left the cinema and discussed it, isn't really a twist, more a shift in story perspective that makes the first half of the film seem like a pre-inciting incident sequence stretched to 45 minutes. That section of the movie, concerning Hancock's depression and attempts to better himself and become a beloved hero, contains many funny moments and unexpected pathos, but if you've seen the trailer, you've seen a lot of the best parts. However, the trailers will make you think this is the whole point of the film, and give no hints as to what it really is. The depression and bad behaviour of Hancock are the set-up for the big reveal later in the movie, and if you thought you were going to see a superhero spoof, you're wrong. It's a straight superhero movie with a mythology that might have made more sense in the first draft (though some people are not too keen even on that), that has been mistakenly seen as a twist movie whereas it is a story different than the one we were sold, one which has its emotional centre buried in the final moments of the film, which then crawls over the finish line with zero energy and a frustrating lack of resonance. That's a problem with the script, but also with the handling of it. It's fair to say that Berg, who re-edited the finale several times in order to beat the bad feedback from test screenings, had to change even more than just the underwhelming ending, considering how the original script featured Hancock having ejaculation issues, something that is totally absent from the movie.

Too much of the movie is lying on an editing room floor for it to make any sense. Perhaps a two hour version would work better. This ninety minute version feels like two episodes of a TV show called Hancock shmushed together to make a feature film (just like in the 70s when Glen A. Larson was trying to squeeze more money out of his creations), but sadly the Hancock showrunners have ineptly combined a mid-season comedy episode and an end-of-season high drama episode, not realising they don't quite go together. With two halves battling against each other, what's the story it's trying to tell? Even once we had picked it over while eating an excellent burger just off Abbey Road neither of us had a clue, and after tinkering with it for a long time, I doubt Berg knew either.


The second half of the movie concerns Hancock discovering that he is one of many millennia-old heroes created by the Gods to protect humanity, but forced to be apart from them due to his immense power. Luckily, the Gods knew that their minions were bound to want to settle down eventually, and so created them in pairs, where each one of them acts as a power dampener for the other, allowing them to live as a human couple if they so wanted. That's happened to every other hero on the planet, except for Hancock and his opposite, Charlize Theron. All of the others are now dead, for reasons not clearly explained. It's either old age, accidents, or "Them" that have picked them off. Who are "Them"? You've got me. Neither of us could understand that plot point, or if the evil Red, played by Eddie Marsan, is one of these "Them"s that are important enough to be referred to but not important enough to be explained. One thing that is stressed very late in the film, however, is that proximity to each other sets off the power drain, and only living as far apart as possible allows them to remain super.

I can get behind the idea of a mythology not being fully explained, so as to generate some mystery (as in Unbreakable), but if the events of a movie make no sense (as the actions of the main characters seem completely mysterious without a full explanation), you cannot connect with the events on the screen. One gets the idea that editing the movie into this empty mush has taken out a lot of exposition that might have helped. To make things worse, a lot of the information I explained above is all delivered just moments before it becomes relevant in the last five minutes of the movie, so you spend the majority of the movie not really understanding what the hell is going on, or why you should care.


It's like the latter hour of Atonement, with a lot of things happening for no explicable reason, and then the final scene comes along to straighten everything out, except that here, nothing really gets explained properly. Again, it might have been in order to generate mystery, and curiosity about the mythology, and in that sense it works, as I'm inspired enough by the vagueness to want to read the previous drafts, and hopefully see a longer DVD cut to find out more about these individuals, but as it stands, the film falls completely apart at the end of the second act, and the third act did nothing more than annoy me greatly. Contrary to the marketing, the movie is not just about a drunken hero, but with a second half as ill-formed and messy as this, I guess it might as well have been.

Even worse, some iconic moments in the trailer are either omitted or just breeze by, so badly edited is the film. It felt like every decision made in post-production was a mistake. John Dykstra's effects are rushed and unappealing, the action scenes have no oomph as the editing obscures events, and the soundtrack is horribly misjudged, either trying to generate the emotional connection that is missing onscreen, or being brassy comedy plinky-plonks you'd expect on NCIS or something equally silly. As for the leads, I liked them, but their efforts often make no sense at all. The best thing I can say about it is that I went along with it simply because they obviously believed in what they were doing, but I have no idea what that thing they were doing was. Is Hancock about loneliness? About responsibility? Does Hancock do the right thing at the end to save Theron? Or is he still out for himself? I can imagine we're meant to think of his actions as selfless, but that's just because we expect the film to follow certain conventions. As it stands, the movie doesn't make it clear enough on its own. When it was over, we were approximately this nonplussed.



---------------------Spoilers Over------------------

I think I liked it more than Wanted, and probably less than Jumper, another compromised movie from a director I like from a concept I loved, but it didn't help that prior to that we saw the eagerly awaited (by me) Kung Fu Panda, which was not only way better than anything else I've seen this year, but thousands and thousands of times better than I had hoped it would be. The opening scene alone was better than I thought Dreamworks/PDI would ever aspire to, the sequence so funny and clever and eye-blisteringly beautiful that I was helpless in the storytellers' grip. The voice casting is spot-on (especially my main man Jables, who is utterly sincere and hysterically funny), the direction perfectly judged, the action more exciting than most action films I can name, and the emotional arcs totally satisfying. The showdown between Shifu and Tai Lung was a magnificently cinematic moment, with genuinely resonant power. Make no mistake, the studio might not have made anything worthwhile before, but this is Pixar-good. I'd even put it above Cars, Finding Nemo, and maybe A Bug's Life, and possibly on a par with Toy Story 2, it's that good.


Some UK critics have treated it as a mildly amusing spoof of Hong Kong cinema (the increasingly off-target Peter Bradshaw reckoned it was dumbed-down and less sophisticated than the first two Shreks!!?!?!!!). However, the majority of critics got what it was aiming for. Even the perenially grouchy Cosmo Landesman loved it, which means we have seen eye-to-eye twice this year. The other time was Speed Racer; he was pretty much the only UK critic to like it, though the Times website has decided not to reprint it, thus making me seem delusional.


It's no wonder even critics who often turn a blind eye to genre movies understand the ambition of Kung Fu Panda. the opening ten minutes of Kung Fu Panda should have clued any viewer in to its utter sincerity. This is a real movie, a simple tale beautifully told by people who understand not only the conventions of the genre and the signifying details that make it distinct (watch the wonderful Master Oogway's final scene under a peach tree and tell me they don't love the genre and want to do right by it), but they also understand how to tell a story. Perhaps this story is less complex than what I assume the makers of Hancock were aiming for, and perhaps it is more straightforward than Wanted (a movie with a similar character arc involving destiny and self-belief), but it is almost infinitely better than either of them for one simple reason; everyone involved in the making of this film knew how to tell a story, knew what worked and what didn't, and just made it knowing the audience would be right there with them. Sometimes that's all it takes.


So yes, I recommend Kung Fu Panda with every fibre of my being. And Canyon's too! We loved it so much we're hoping to see it again this week, this time on IMAX. Something this beautifully crafted and sumptuous to look at needs to be seen on as big and clear a screen as possible. If I could describe its level of quality in one sentence while resisting the urge to just wail nonsense sounds of joy, that sentence would be, "It does everything right." It really, really does. If you've ever enjoyed a martial arts movie, you must not miss it.

Updates On Things I Said Before And Stuff

During the last few weeks of maintaining this blog I've made trillions of unfounded and poorly researched statements that have served to do nothing other than create a small corner of the internet where my world view reigns supreme no matter how different it is from actual reality (though really, who believes in objective reality anymore? That's a 20th Century concept, daddio). Well, occasionally it seems logical to go back and have a quick look to see how wrong that reality is.

1. Jumper will fail at the box office.

While giving my very long-winded opinion on Doug Liman's hip teleportation-porn sci-fi action thriller Jumper, I said the following:

I know Liman intended for the story to continue, but I really hope he had nothing to do with the stupidity of this final conversation, which answers no questions and leaves everyone's fates uncertain. People got mad at the end of Matrix Reloaded and Pirates of the Caribbean 2 because they were left up in the air, but at least the next installments were being made. Jumper ends with pretty much no resolution, and we probably won't ever get any. That's not cool to leave us hanging like that, filmmaking dudes. Look at how pissed off everyone was about Doc Savage and Buckaroo Banzai not getting the sequels we were promised.

Seriously, I'm gutted we never got that Doc Savage sequel, even though the original wasn't that great. Anyway, how badly did Jumper do? According to Boxofficemojo, four day weekend gross was approximately $33,850,000. That's not including the foreign box office, which will significantly include eight and a half of my hard-earned pounds. Not the biggest hit ever, and it will very probably drop off a lot, but two other movies had a four-day opening this week, and they didn't do anywhere near as well. It might even make back its $85m budget in time. I'm not sure that's enough for a sequel, but we can hope.

2. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus might still go ahead.

Seems it is indeed on the way, with Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell coming to the rescue. This pleases me greatly. I may not be the biggest Jude Law fan, but I'm still glad he's onboard. My love for Depp is the thing of legend, and Farrell is my favourite ever mojito fiend, so that's even better.


I will never apologise for loving Miami Vice! Do you hear me, world? NEVER!

3. Torchwood is shit.

No change there; the memory-warp episode Adam was still not good by normal TV standards. However, by Torchwood standards, it was passable. Filled with illogicalities and plot holes and some of the worst acting outside of community theatre, but it had some good ideas. Not all of them were well developed, and it doesn't help that an episode about altered identities is featured on a show where the characters are different from week to week anyway, but it wasn't a total screw-up. Plus, I saw Bryan Dick, who played memory-implant-thing Adam on Neal Street, larking about with some friends on Friday night, and he seemed to be having a great time, and I wouldn't want to contribute to ruining that good mood even a couple of days later. He was not bad in Torchwood, though not as good he was in Master and Commander. Better material and a better director, obviously.



However, our Sky+ box decided to ignore that the next episode, featuring the incredible MARTHA JONES was on after it, so I'm going to have to watch it on the now much-improved iPlayer. It's a battle between content delivery systems!

ETA: Thank you to all who have said nice things about the Meat post. I shall endeavour to monitor Torchwood's status as national shame-provider soon.

Might As Well Jump?

*Warning - Jumper spoilers!*

Released with no press screenings and a flurry of newspaper ads and billboards, Jumper was rushed into cinemas in these often cinematically dead weeks of February a day earlier than usual, possibly in a cynical effort to make its weekend gross a little bigger. Pity for Fox (something not often said) that this year February sees the UK release of Cloverfield Monster Movie and National Treasure: Bag of Cakes for the casual cinema-goer and There Will Be DRAAAAIIIINAGE! and The Diving Fly and the Butterbell for more committed filmbuffs. With those powerhouse movies filling London screens, what chance does Jumper have? I recall seeing the trailer a while back and thinking it looked amazing, and then watched as the consensus turned against it for no reason that I could discern other than residual bitterness over Darth Vader: The Whiny Teenage Years.


Well, I'm not going to be told what to think by a bunch of bitter talkbackers who still blame the shittiness of the "first" three episodes of Star Wars on Hayden Christensen (here playing Jumper David), and want to see this fail just because he's in it. It's by Doug Liman! The script was written by David "Blade trilogy" Goyer! And Jim "Fight Club" Uhls! Oh, and Simon "X-Men: The Last Stand, xXx: State Of The Union" Kinberg. ::sigh:: And it's got Samuel L. (for Lovable) Jackson as a white-haired bad guy called Roland like some nod to Childe Roland! And Rachel Bilson as Millie, hopefully matching her adorableness with some audible dialogue for once! Oh, and Teddy Dunn as a jock idiot. And Jamie Bell as crazy Jumper Griffin. ::supersigh::

::Quick synopsis::

David is a loser kid, until he finds out he can teleport. He teleports a lot and leaves his old life behind, though bad re-editing means it's unclear whether people think he's alive or dead. He steals money from bank vaults and leaves IOUs because he's not all bad, but when he regrettably gets older and the likeable Max Thieriot is replaced by a particularly smug Anakin Skywalker, he is found by Roland, played by Mace Windu (moving up from killing motherfucking snakes on motherfucking planes to killing teleporting teenagers). He's the top psycho of the mysterious Paladins, who hunt and murder Jumpers because something something. David escapes, and finds his childhood sweetheart, played by the lovely Summer Roberts, and selfishly gets her involved with him, and makes a bunch of really bad choices that get her hunted by the Paladins as well (ETA: Capone agrees with me on that one). This thankfully damages his smugness chip, bringing his penitence and fear circuits into play. He also comes across another Jumper called Griffin, who is really obnoxious and has terrible facial hair. I mean seriously bad. Ratty, even. It will annoy you. They reluctantly team up to kill Roland, but after lots of objects and vehicles and places get teleported around the globe in thrilling style, Diane Lane turns up as the most pointless and least effective deus ex machina ever and brings about an unconvincing happy ending that probably sets up a sequel that will never be made, or is just a really rushed reshoot that means nothing and was imposed by an oblivious and narrative averse bunch of blank-brained moneymen from 20th Century Fucks.

The End!

It's the first time in a long time that I've seen a movie before reading any press reviews, and it does not bode well for my career as a pop culture blogger that I'm not sure what to think of it. I definitely enjoyed much of it, and think the bad reviews are mean-spirited and missing the mark quite widely (and are possibly biased as this is a mere genre picture and not worthy of critical attention), but it's a mess, and some of the performances are horrible (you can guess who the culprits are), and it's obviously been reshot to the point of incoherence.


Whether that's by Liman is debatable. He is notorious for reshooting his own movies in order to get them right, and his jitteriness was apparent early on when he recast the role of David, taking Tom Sturridge off the film and handing it over to Christensen. From that link I also notice the script featured him looking for the killers of his mother. I've not read Steven Gould's original novel, so I don't know if that was from that, but it certainly isn't in the finished film either. In a series of scenes that hint very strongly at some last minute tinkering, David's mother (played by Diane Lane) is alive and well and apparently leading the Paladins (or at least heavily involved). Her scenes look shoe-horned in, and late references to her (especially during the Egypt lair fight scene) come out of nowhere.

The final scene, in which David finds her house and she tells him he's getting a head start is especially bad. As a happy ending it makes no sense (he seems remarkably chipper even though he's still being hunted by murderous killers), and as I said earlier, might be seen as a lead-in to a sequel. I know Liman intended for the story to continue, but I really hope he had nothing to do with the stupidity of this final conversation, which answers no questions and leaves everyone's fates uncertain. People got mad at the end of Matrix Reloaded and Pirates of the Caribbean 2 because they were left up in the air, but at least the next installments were being made. Jumper ends with pretty much no resolution, and we probably won't ever get any. That's not cool to leave us hanging like that, filmmaking dudes. Look at how pissed off everyone was about Doc Savage and Buckaroo Banzai not getting the sequels we were promised. (Here is a visual representation of the cognitive dissonance I felt upon walking out of the very lovely Apollo West End, the nicest cinema in London.)


Even worse is the casting, though some of this is a purely personal thing. I really don't like Christensen or Dunn, who was so bland on Veronica Mars. Even worse is the appearance of Jamie Bell, whose presence grated in King Kong and yet is even worse here. Perhaps I only think that because of this interview with the Times, during which he bitched about working with Peter Jackson, and then uncharitably complained about being in Jumper.

Bell seems remarkably frank about the cold reality of his ascent. He says that, fundamentally, he’s drawn to playing losers and oddballs in esoteric, low-budget movies, and finds blockbusters painfully limiting. His role, for instance, as a cabin boy in Peter Jackson’s King Kong was: “Not really acting, but just saying lines.” Even worse, the time he spent on Jumper was “soul-sucking. It just destroys you. It’s terrible. I didn’t learn anything about myself on that movie, about my technique or anything."

Shame you didn't learn how to be a likable and charismatic presence onscreen. I suggest you do more stage work. Very educational. Still, at least he registers. Christensen is that most amazing of things; a pure void, like the Lack from Jonatham Lethem's superb novel, As She Climbed Across The Table. There is nothing going on in his eyes, which apparently worked well for him in Shattered Glass. Here, it helps in his portrayal of someone who has no personality (according to Canyon, who has seen the movie and says Christensen is great, that's pretty much what he was like in Glass), as he has spent much of his life avoiding contact with anyone (or anything; I like the moment when one getaway fails because he's forgotten how to open doors). That's great, but how much of that is intentional, and how much of that is down to his shortcomings as an actor? I need more proof of his talent; Jumper does not provide this evidence. Plus, it makes it hard to care for him in later scenes, and Millie is so poorly sketched that you shouldn't care for her either. There is almost no suspense at all, or at least there wouldn't be if the vicious nature of the Paladins didn't raise the stakes so high.


Luckily, Rachel Bilson, while still not exactly a master of enunciation, is wonderfully charming, and her pointless damsel in distress character works simply because you don't want anything bad to happen to her. There are some really weak scenes carried just by her performance, so thank God for her. Also wonderful is Jackson, who, I'm sorry, can do no wrong, so please don't try to debate this. He's pure misguided evil in this. That the Paladins would seek to kill these miraculous individuals instead of harnessing their powers for good genuinely made me furious. Man, considering I'm in two minds about this movie, the Paladins sure pissed me off. Oh, and as I said before, Diane Lane was in it too. As Canyon pointed out when I told her about the movie yesterday, she keeps getting wasted in these shitty movies. She's right. She's grafted in at the last minute and gets nothing to do. It's a terrible waste of a compelling actress.

Other choices smack of cowardice. The opening of the film packs in a lot of event that could probably turn up later, which means you get a hectic opening followed by a really long and boring section as David finds Millie and takes her to Rome (by plane) and slowly seduces her. The first few scenes also feature lots of expositional voiceovers that disappear later in the movie, and are especially frustrating as a cold open with young David's discovery of his powers would work perfectly fine without Christensen's affectless voice straining to sound lively over the top of it. It especially exasperating as so much of the movie is left for the viewer to figure out, so perhaps some Fox suit didn't notice that some scenes of the movie asked something of the audience, and so didn't feel the need to jump in and fiddle with it.

In addition to that regrettable move, some shots from the trailer are missing, and a late action scene in Griffin's Egyptian lair not only replicates some shots of a flamethrower, but is edited so badly as to render the proceedings meaningless. Considering Liman has never had this problem before, it suggests someone else tampered with it.


That said, the action scenes are as frenetic as possible, but are clearly edited (for the most part). Once the powers of the Jumpers are shown often enough, you are able to deduce what their limitations are, as well as the side-effects, and taking that knowledge into the fight scenes, they become quite easy to follow even though they move at a million miles an hour. They're incredibly exhilarating, and like nothing else you have seen before. People flash through the frame in ways you've never imagined, randomly flashing back and forth, blurred by teleport disturbances. When the film concentrates on the mechanics of teleporting it is breathtaking. Plus, if you get annoyed by superhero movies where the powered characters never use their metahuman talents, you will LOVE Jumper. They're teleporting constantly, even when it's not necessary. It never gets boring, either.

Some of the effects are shaky, though when the film is moving at a clip you don't have time to notice. When people are matted into shots of scenery they look awful, like they've been added using MS Paint. That's right! Not even Photoshop-level quality! The teleport effects themselves, though, are wonderful and exciting. Jumpers affect their environment when they teleport, leaving behind Jumpscars that glitter in the air for a few seconds. When jumping to places they know about or are in view, they disturb the air a little, but when teleporting at random they shatter walls and floors, bursting air outwards and blowing things around. It's a violent visual, and deeply thrilling.


I'm a big sci-fi nerd, so I got off on the world that was invented, with such attention paid to working out the way teleporting works. Jumpers like to have Jumpsites memorised so they can zoom from place to place without trouble, and when they can't picture it in their minds eye will look at locations either in their line of sight or in photos. Also great are the scary weapons of the Paladins; tasers, electrified nets, grapples that restrict the Jumpers' teleport range. None of that is explained; they just appear in the movie and are shown working. Aaaah! Show, don't tell! I love ye!

Perhaps the most curious thing about the movie is how far Liman and Kinberg have taken that philosophy of excising exposition where possible (and where left alone by the studio). In an interview conducted during the making of the movie, they discussed some of their intentions of the movie, some of which give a hint as to what was changed during reshoots, and whether they were their choices or those of Fox.

“Comic-book movies like Spider-Man have a pretty specific formula,” Liman says. “Somebody’s determined to destroy the world, and the hero has to stop them. At some point the villain grabs the love interest of the hero, and there’s your third act. We don’t have that. In our movie the main conflict is never explained.”

[Side Note: The third act of the movie features Millie captured by Roland, prompting David to rescue her from the murderous Paladins and Griffin, who plans to blow the Paladins up without caring if she gets hurt in the process. So that didn't work. Reshoot?]

Kinberg adds, “We’re deconstructing a genre that usually presents this black-and-white universe of good guys who have the superpowers, and bad guys who are trying to kill them. In Jumper, as soon as you start to feel comfortable with that moral paradigm, we unravel it.”

He partially succeeds. Both David and Griffin are deeply unlikeable, and it should be hard to root for them. David is a selfish pompous thief, and Griffin is transparently psychotic, which is a fantastic and original way to approach these characters. If you had the ability to be anywhere in the blink of an eye, who would be able to resist the temptation to abuse that power? And if someone tried to stop you doing it, you'd respond pretty damn negatively. Seriously, many kudos to all involved for making their "heroes" so prickly and, in Griffin's case, homicidal.


Sadly, the Paladins are so obviously vile that you end up rooting for the Jumpers anyway. The first time you see Roland and his Paladins take down a Jumper, I had a bizarre, visceral response to their cruelty and violence as they trapped, tortured, and killed a terrified young boy who seemed to not have even done anything wrong by that point. There is no way you can have an ambiguous reaction to it. They're utterly badass bad guys and they are never presented with a morally grey palette.


Even worse, even though Liman had intended to leave the goal of the Paladins as a mystery, Oni Press released a graphic novel by Nunzio DeFilippis, Christina Weird and Brian Hurt which explains the history of the Paladins. Such a choice would annoy purists like John Patterson, as I have moaned about in earlier posts, though I enjoy such extra-curricular projects. However, Oni Press screwed up by only releasing the damn thing yesterday in the US and today in the UK. So I didn't get to read it before. Good for Liman and Kinberg's plan to keep things loose, I guess, but useless as a promotional tool.

If you didn't know about the existence of that book, fear not. A clumsy bit of dialogue from Bell (which seems to have been very poorly looped in) explains that they are religious fundamentalists who have been hunting down Jumpers since the Middle Ages as they are, in their eyes, an affront to the supremacy of God. If you're an athiest, that's another pretty hefty strike against the moral ambiguity. Anyway, they had even greater ambitions.

Both filmmakers studied semiotics at Brown, and they enjoy layering their popcorn movies with subtexts. “We respond to genre films that are actually metaphors for something else,” Kinberg says. “Instead of making a literal movie about ordinary people with a bad marriage, suddenly they have guns in their hands and you have Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Jumper is about somebody who’s running away from his problems and his past. By giving him this superpower we basically just explode that onto a larger stage.”

I can see that, and it works very well. However:

Liman says he wanted Jumper to reflect the “ambiguity of conflicts in the Middle East. Our minds were occupied with that when we were working on the script. If I were Iraqi, I don’t know if I’d think of the Americans as liberators or as occupiers. I don’t really know why the Sunnis and Shiites are fighting.”

Kinberg chimes in: “Your average person on a Friday night probably will not be thinking Middle East when they watch Jumper at the multiplex, but then, no one thought Iran Contra when they saw Bourne Identity.”

Liman completes his friend’s thought: “Hopefully Jumper will feel honest and relevant and people won’t even know why. It will just be: ‘Oh, this movie’s sort of cool and it feels real.’ ”

I guess they were hoping for some kind of "Bring your own metaphor" approach, which would, if this had any realistic chance of being a success, mean that viewers could debate the significance of this fantasy world enough to keep it in viewers' minds long after seeing it. Unfortunately, it also leaves the movie thematically blank. I accept the approach can bring dividends, and as a fan of Lost who is willing to think a million possibly contradictory things about what it means I can't exactly criticise the movie for this. However, does it deserve to be picked apart in this way? Is it so thematically loose that there is no point trying to assign meaning to it? Here are a few of the thoughts I had while watching it:

• The Paladins are the American Army occupying Iraq and trying to bring Western values to the country by force, and the Jumpers are the Iraqi citizens forced to fight to maintain their own way of life.
• The Paladins are the murderous "insurgents" trying to repel the forces of modernity represented by the Jumpers, aka the American Army.
• The Paladins are religious fundamentalists resisting the forces of reason and science, and the Jumpers represent atheism, as they have effectively "killed" God just by existing.
• The Paladins are religious fundamentalists resisting youth culture and its corrupting ways, and the Jumpers are cool kids who just wanna drink Red Bull and have fun, yeah? Yeah!
• The Paladins are strict parental figures who want their kids to settle down and get solid jobs, and the Jumpers are the late teens who want to go travelling in their gap year and then study something other than engineering.
• The Paladins are shareholders in the London Transport PPP and are protecting their profit margin, and Jumpers are fare-dodgers.
• The Paladins think Family Guy is the best animated show on TV, the Jumpers love South Park.
• The Paladins want to flouridate water supplies, the Jumpers think that's just crazy.
• The Paladins are pro-bangs, the Jumpers think an exposed forehead is much more attractive.
• The Paladins think people should up their iron intake using vitamins made by GlaxoSmithKline, the Jumpers think people should eat more broccoli.

You could make it anything you want, which is often the case with thematically rich material, but Jumper is so devoid of hints as to what it wants to be that it is a big empty space on the screen, and what makes it worse is that the tinkering makes even that possible jug of lemonade go wrong. I could just accept the movie as blank entertainment, but the people involved are too smart to make something empty, even though Liman has called this the last part of his sell-out trilogy (I may not have liked Mr. And Mrs. Smith but I appreciate that it was trying to say something about relationships even though those ideas were submerged under a lot of nonsense). I'd love to know more about what Liman, Kinberg, Uhls and Goyer were trying for, and how much of their work got screwed with by Fox, because right now it's very hard to judge their level of success, but I doubt there'll be a director's cut boxset coming out any time soon. Ugh, wishing for something like that is the kind of thing that can turn into an obsession. I need to keep an eye on that.

So, I greatly enjoyed it on an emotional, "OMG so cool!" level, was frustrated by the failure to reach its intellectual aspirations, and annoyed deeply by the studio interference (if indeed that's what it was. Remember this is the studio that screwed Mike Judge so badly over the satirical classic Idiocracy). Perhaps my critical judgement was altered by recently withstanding the incredible emotional one-two punch of the aforementioned Diving Bell and Blood, both of which are absolutely phenomenal. Even though Jumper had a lot to like (and some visual sequences that will scorch your corneas off), it pales compared to those.

Maybe that's unfair of me, but we're talking some serious filmic genius in those, and though I really like Doug Liman's work and look forward to all of his films, this is hampered so badly by interference that it would only ever win out on a nerdy "I love teleportation movies!" level. I guess for now the best cinematic representation of cool teleporting remains Bryan Singer's kickass opening to X-Men 2, with Nightcrawler bamfing the shit out of some Secret Service chaps. Ignore the rock music added to this, and revel in the coolness.