Jumping mad

I saw Jumper last night with Boy du Jour. And ooh, it annoyed me something chronic.

I don't demand a lot from my movies - my all-time faves are Deep Blue Sea and Lake Placid, for heaven's sake - and as long as something blows up I'm generally pretty happy. But this film has managed to piss me off on a lot of levels and if I don't rant about it my head may just explode.

The basic premise is the classic tale of the school geek who discovers he has An Amazing Power. He gets a bit carried away with the excitement and becomes a selfish, arrogant tosser who lives the high life by breaking into banks and generally behaving like someone who needs a good slapping. So far so good - a time-honoured set up enabling him to learn An Important Lesson, start to Use his Power For Good and ultimately to Win The Girl who had been Too Cool for him at school.

But that's too much like hard work for this particular piece of movie magic. Instead, he simply walks into the bar where she's working and says "hey, it's me, I'm no longer geeky and I've got loads of money. Want to go to Rome?"

She hesitates for - actually, no, she doesn't even hesitate. Next thing we know they're on a plane to Rome, where she falls onto the bed with squeals of glee and her legs in the air. No, it's not an exaggeration; that's exactly what she does.

So let's recap. We've ascertained that he's an arrogant tosser and she's just a straightforward marketable commodity. Nice. I'm starting to suspect that he's not meant to be a classic "save the world" kind of hero - perhaps he's a Loveable Rogue, a Dashing Antihero in the mould of James Bond (who, let's face it, is a sexist pig - but a sexist pig who you can't help loving). A hero who you suspect isn't actually that "nice" a person, but you really want him to win anyway... like Professor Snape. (... or is that just me?)

On that premise, what Our Hero needs now is a Real Baddy to allow him to show his True Colours and prove that he's more than just some jumped up little clot. But instead, it turns out that he's being chased by people who also think he's behaving like a selfish twat and would really quite like him to stop. (I think that's pretty fair; hell, I'd have shot him too, and I didn't have nearly as much provocation as they did.)

The bottom line is that nothing changes over the entire course of the film. He behaves like a twat from start to finish. He finds a fellow-jumper who he treats phenomenally badly and leaves tied to an electricity pylon (and that's the last we see of the friend - for all we know he's still there). He stops the baddies in a rather improbable fashion and goes back to the lifestyle he had at the start (albeit now with the girl in tow), all the while protesting "but I'm not hurting anyone, why do they want to kill poor misunderstood little me?"

I'm not going to go into the bad plotting or the ridiculous ending (but can someone explain WHY it's better to leave his nemesis to dehydrate and starve to death in a tiny cave in the middle of the Grand Canyon than to drop him into the sea? And if he does survive, what was the point of doing it in the first place? He's just going to keep coming after you!). Instead I'm mostly focused on the portrayal of women, and particularly of the heroine, which I think was shoddy and degrading. He bought her for the price of a trip to Rome and yet we're still supposed to believe that she'd hang around being shot at and kidnapped (she's a singularly useless girl who seems incapable of doing anything other than occasionally look soulfully at the camera) because she "really cares for him". Ah yes, that old chestnut: money can indeed buy you the genuine and honest love of beautiful women who wouldn't look twice at you in your schooldays.

Honestly, what a sexist piece of claptrap! Someone else obviously thought so too - and gave us the ham-fisted addition of his mother as a token "strong female character", which I darkly suspect is what she was intended to be. That little plan was a total failure, by the way; she's as useless as the heroine, and appears so fleetingly (and with so little conviction) that she's barely worth mentioning at all.

Rachel Bilson, you're better than this.

That's two hours of my life I'm never going to get back.