“Roll, roll, roll in ze hay.” - Inga, Young Frankenstein

By Lisa Fary

“I was a chump, like you.” David, the main character, says in the first minutes of Jumper. He may no longer be a chump, but David has successfully made the transition to douchebag.

Teleporting from New York to London is kind of cool. Teleporting from New York to the face of Big Ben in London or the top of the Sphinx in Egypt is stupid. Does David not realize that those are tourist attractions, and not tourist attractions like The Thing? in Arizona. I’m sure many tourists in the Jumper-verse looked at their vacation pictures and exclaimed, “What the hell? There’s a douchebag on Big Ben!”

David himself could be a tourist attraction worthy of his own entry in Roadside America, but not for his teleportation abilities. He’s the world’s biggest (and laziest) douchebag. OK, maybe not the biggest - after all, he’s not shown playing in an Ultimate Frisbee league or anything.

In his fabulous New York apartment, David teleports five feet from the kitchen counter to the refrigerator. Then he teleports from one sofa cushion to another to avoid reaching for the remote control. That’s just lazy.

AND THEN!!!!

Then came the moment that made me think, “Wow! I hope this guy dies!” David turns on the television and watches a bit of news. There’s massive flooding going on somewhere, people are stranded and the authorities aren’t sure how to get them out. Does David throw on a ski mask and start teleporting people out of the flood zone? Does David do something heroic? No. David teleports to London to get laid.

So, he reads Marvel Team Up, but isn’t familiar with the age old proverb, “With great power comes great responsibility”?

We’ve established that David is a douchebag. What else is wrong? The villain is a moron. That’s right. Samuel L. Jackson as Roland isn’t a bad ass in Jumper; he’s a moron, and a hypocritical one at that. I initially thought he was part of a government agency or international guild of bad guys or something awesome like that. Nope. Roland’s beef with the jumpers is that only God should have that kind of power. The bad guys are religious fanatics who kill jumpers in the name of God.

Ugh.

The whole movie comes off as if it were written by a functionally illiterate fifteen year old boy who thinks xXx: State of the Union is the best movie ever. Story comes second to David’s awesome jumping antics. Logical consequences are cut for sweeping shots of one fabulous location after another. David can get on a plane with a backpack full of cash? Then when he’s arrested in Rome, the police didn’t search the cash filled backpack? Really? There’s a fire and a significant disturbance at an apartment building and the authorities don’t show up?

And again, no one notices the guy eating a sandwich on top of the Sphinx?

Part of the blame falls on screenwriter Simon Kinsburg, who brought us idiot parades as xXx: State of the Union, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and X-Men: The Last Stand. I’d like to believe it has little to do with David Goyer because I love his Batman work; on the other hand, he’s been responsible for some stinkers, too. Dark City, anyone?

The Mist traps a cross-section of the American demographic in a small town grocery store, throws all manner of tentacle creatures, carnivorous spiders, and giant flying bugs at them and lets the fear driven drama unfold. It’s like a mash-up of No Exit and Lord of the Flies, filtered through Stephen King.

With The Mist, the horror isn’t about a military science experiment gone wrong. Very little time is even spent explaining where the mist came from or what the creatures within it are. A less talented writer and director would have spent the first ten or fifteen minutes on that alone, showing the military installation, showing the experiment fall into chaos.

Luckily, Frank Darabont, who adapted the screenplay from Stephen King’s novella, doesn’t take the viewer for an idiot and knows that all that exposition isn’t needed. The real horror in The Mist is the humanity. Remember the end of Animal Farm, when the animals peek inside the manor house and can no longer see a difference between the pigs and the men? The Mist is like that. I still can’t decide which was more monstrous: the monsters or the humans.

Particularly horrific is Marcia Gay Harden as Mrs. Carmody, a woman who starts out as a mildly unpleasant fundamentalist, the type often found hollering on college campuses across the country, and steadily becomes something much more horrifying and sinister. Imagine Brother Jed Smock - with a nastier attitude - carried out to his scariest Old Testament conclusion; that’s pretty much where Harden takes Mrs. Carmody.

The Mist does have a twist ending. Normally, when I hear a movie has a twist ending, I groan because it’s either going to be something totally obvious, or an M. Night Shamalan film (how’s that, Shamalan? I just made you a punchline!). The Mist’s ending isn’t so much a twist as it is Alanis Morissette’s lost lyric to “Ironic”.

Did you know Jumper was also a literary adaptation? Yep. It was nominated for several awards and was one of the most frequently challenged books of the 1990s. The book is supposed to be quite good (and more about domestic abuse than the applications of teleportation), but you’d never know it by watching the movie. The Mist, while it isn’t the same caliber as Darabont’s other King adaptations, it is a faithful adaptation that maintains the spirit of the novella. The Mist wins.

The winners’ circle so far. . .

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Lisa Fary’s early exposure to classic Battlestar Galactica in 1979 is largely responsible for her lifelong interest in science fiction and her childhood ambition of being an intergalactic space cowgirl. She thinks diagramming sentences is a fun alternative to Sudoku.