It’s like a Hitchcockian thriller meets “War of the Roses,” in which pitch black comedy is nestled snugly inside big action set pieces. This leads the two of them to try to off one another, with increasingly spectacular and violent results. Smith” is neat – a married couple (played by Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie) discover that they’re both working as deadly secret agents. Smith” isn’t a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s not a particularly interesting one, either. Remembered mostly for the fiery off set romance that the film ignited, “Mr. And while Liman was able to conjure several truly stunning set pieces, none of them particularly mean anything, and, at least in journalistic circles, the movie is more remembered for its lavish press junket, which took place in both London and Cairo (select press members “jumped” between the locations via a private plane), than the actual movie.ĭoug Liman on How He Kept His Explosive Brett Kavanaugh Documentary Under Wraps Until Now “Mr.

Jackson’s silver hair to Diane Lane’s oddly stiff performance.

These days the movie would have been packaged as a yummy YA thing, but at the time it was just bizarre and bad – everything from Samuel L. Goyer and “Fight Club” adapter Jim Uhls, all of whom were working, loosely from a novel by Steven Gould. For a movie about characters who propel themselves wildly through space and time, “Jumper” is utterly rudderless, thanks to a too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen script that included contributions from frequent Liman collaborator Simon Kinberg, “Batman Begins” scribe David S. The movie concerns a young man (Hayden Christensen, maybe even more wooden than he was in “Star Wars”) who has the ability to “jump” – to magically teleport from one location to another, like Nightcrawler from “X-Men.” Instead of using his power for any kind of altruistic endeavor, Christensen is just a dick – he steals stuff, gallivants around the globe, and woos a comely young woman (played by Rachel Bilson, from Liman’s Fox series “The OC”). Liman must have been up to something with “Jumper,” but even now we can’t quite figure out what that something was.

White Knuckle by Steven Bruce