10 Movies That Would Make Better TV Shows

Doug Liman’s science-fiction action movie of eight years ago made its money back at the box office, but not sufficiently to lead immediately to a sequel. Reviews were less positive - the consensus appeared to be that the narrative was poorly paced, feeling rushed and incoherent, with a disappointing ending.

That pacing might have been a stylistic choice, of course. After all, the movie was about men and women with the power to teleport instantly from place to place - the Jumpers of the title. Hunted by religious extremists convinced that their power was blasphemous (“only God should have the power to be everywhere”), the film follows David and his attempts to live the life of Riley by stealing an inordinate amount of money every so often.

The movie never makes it clear why some people can teleport but most can’t, or how Samuel L. Jackson’s Paladins know how to confine a Jumper in the first place. In the books, it’s made clear that Jumping is a learnable ability, but the only people that really exhibit it are the protagonist, his girlfriend and, later, their daughter - in the film, David meets up with a more militant and violent Jumper with as much of a hard-on for killing Paladins as they have for killing Jumpers.

So much of this mythology needed more space to be unpacked, but Liman seems determined to keep that breakneck speed going throughout. Liman’s movie includes plenty of elements not present in the books, many of which are excellent ideas that he doesn’t have time to flesh out.

Jumper clocks in at eighty-eight minutes, positively anorexic by the standards of modern popcorn movies - some restructuring and a little light and shade would have helped considerably.

That’s the kind of thing that television manages far more successfully than films; the open-ended conclusion is one that would have worked far better on TV, too.