Samuel L Jackson: 5 Awesome Performances And 5 That Sucked

2. Roland Cox - Jumper (2008)

A second team-up for Jackson and Hayden Christensen, and another high-concept sci-fi, this time helmed by Doug Liman, and featuring an actually not bad concept of a teenager who discovers his power for teleportation completely by accident. Then Professor Xavier turns up, invites him to the Academy, and... Wrong film. Jumper is very much a sub-X-Men sci-fi, and the concept should have done well (which perhaps explains the ridiculous open ended cliffhanger,) but the script is erratic at best, and bafflingly convoluted at worst, and the overall impact is considerably worse than even the third X-Men movie. The biggest problem comes with the central hero/villain dynamic: Hayden Christensen is painfully wooden, and Jackson seems to have over-compensated, meaning there's both a lack of charisma, and too much forced charm at the same time, and all of the human characters feel like background distractions to the special effects.