Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... if hearing John Powell's standard chase mode manipulated with a variety of warped, exotic tones is worth tolerating the absence of stylish orchestral flair and truly kick-ass action sequences. Avoid it... if you can't stand scores that tease you with a fantastic theme and then abandon it for nearly the entire remainder of the work. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
Jumper: (John Powell) Studios don't require positive reviews of a popular movie to start planning its sequels. Or do they? The adaptation of the premise of spontaneous teleportation from Steven Gould's novel into the 2008 Doug Liman movie Jumpers had all the trademarks of a franchise in the making, most obviously starting with tremendous worldwide box office returns. But the production of Jumpers at 20th Century Fox wasn't as smooth as one might think, the story re-written and the characters aged at such a late time that the original cast had to be dismissed just a couple of weeks prior to shooting. All indications from the crew that the concept was developed with a franchise in mind were countered in the following years by a surprising lack of movement in the production of another Jumpers film. Perhaps that should come as a gift to critics who blasted the movie from every possible angle. The plot is shallow, with enough logical fallacies for even fantasy action enthusiasts to question, and the targeted demographic of males under 25 years of age didn't leave room for much intelligence in that story. The main protagonist is a young man who discovers that he is a "jumper," someone who can willingly teleport himself anywhere on the planet at a whim. Naturally, he does what any dork would do in that situation: steals from banks and lives life like an overprivileged bum. Sadly for his convenience, he discovers that there is a group of villains (religions nuts who find the jumpers ungodly, no less) seeking to destroy his kind, and so he is thrust into battle with them while trying to protect, of course, his childhood crush. The most interesting character is his mother, but her role was little more than a teaser for that elusive sequel. If all of this sounds juvenile, then at least take solace in the fact that Liman collaborates regularly with composer John Powell, an artist who tends to spice up action movies with ballsy, exotic music. The two had already worked together on The Bourne Identity and Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and this project promised to combine the rhythmic movement of the first score with the stylish flair of the latter. Unfortunately, Jumper sounds like the kind of ensemble mess that results when you have way too many people involved as part of the crew of the soundtrack recording, and the absolutely unwieldy number of people credited in its creation on the score album's insert is testimony to such a fragmentation of personality. While Powell has been guilty of this bloating of the process on other occasions, this is rare moment when he really does emulate the worst procedural aspects of Hans Zimmer's methodology. As such, anyone expecting Powell to be at the top of his game for Jumper will be disappointed. There are flashes of the composer's better action and chase scores to be heard in fragments throughout the work, but the majority of this material sounds like a composer on auto-pilot and his assistants filling in holes where necessary. It's a score with really poor organizational cohesion, despite its thematic continuity, for you never get a sense what the composer and his assistants were trying to accomplish on a larger scale by jumping wildly around in style and placing their thematic identities in curious places. On the surface, a fair amount of Powell's looped percussive abrasiveness from the Jason Bourne scores will be encountered, but never will this sound be sustained satisfactorily. The action cues in Jumper are very subpar, with no kick-ass moment of stylish force that Powell's scores are typically known for having. Some listeners will point to "Coliseum Fight" and its dynamic, live percussion and vocal tones, but even this cue is inconsistent in its flow. Instead, you hear Powell attempting to compensate by spicing up the soundscape with a ton of electronically manipulated, heavily processed sounds relating usually to exotic plucked or strummed instruments. There are stereotypical male and female vocals of a vaguely exotic nature, as well as electric guitars, synthetic sound effects of electrical zapping and metallic grinding. But the use of either real or synthetic mandolin, sitar, harp, or guitar sounds, often altered electronically to create a warped variation of the instruments' natural voice, is the dominant factor in Jumper. Whatever strictly organic-sounding passages of warmth that exist are countered by heavy metal thrashing, as heard together in "The Scarifice." Thematically, Powell must have approached Jumper with the idea of a larger franchise in mind, because he devises identities that seem to represent both this film alone and something of greater reach. The main theme for the young man is a bit elusive, heard first on slight mandolin effects at the start of "First Jumps." Its unusual instrumental presentations continue on processed cimbalom at the end of "Bridges, Rules, Banking," in slight, warped plucking in "Roland Snoops" and "It's Sayonara," and in the sitar-like plucked tones of "Echo of Mom" and hints on harp in "Airport Departure." In "Coliseum Tour," it's forced into the role of a love theme and is strained in melodramatic string variations in the first half of "The Sacrifice." While this theme is nearly omnipresent in the meat of the score, Powell's other idea for Jumper vastly overshadows it despite far fewer references. The opening and closing cues, "My Day So Far" and "A Jump Off," provide what's likely the franchise theme, both with the kind of jazzy exuberance and clarity in enunciation from brass that could have made the theme a popular marching band staple had the movie and score achieved greater fame. The piano baseline of these performances is worthy of the best television themes of yesteryear, snazzy to a fault but highly enjoyable. Outside of these cues, you only hear this theme have an impact in "The Sacrifice" and "A Head Start" at the end, likely accompanying the mother's portion of the storyline to represent the larger narrative arc. Compared to the rest of the score, this theme is so entertaining in all of its forms that you can't help but be disappointed with the remainder of the work, especially with the fact that ensemble's performances in those bookending tracks is so well recorded with the percussion, expressing a rare glint of passion and, daresay, sex appeal in an otherwise bleak score. They highlight only about five minutes of lastingly memorable music on the score album for Jumper, joining the first half of "The Sacrifice," and all of "A Head Start." That album has a few assembly flaws worth noting, too. It seems as though some of the tracks were compiled from a series of short cues that shift wildly in style, both "Bridges, Rules, Banking" and "The Sacrifice" fading to silence several times before shifting in a completely different direction. For writing one of the best jazzy themes you'll ever hear in an unexpected place in cinema, Powell achieves a three star rating, but the rest of it screams of a large crew attempting way too hard to give the score a unique sound without regard to the bigger picture. *** Track Listings:
Total Time: 44:11
All artwork and sound clips from Jumper are Copyright © 2008, Lakeshore Records. The reviews and notes contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Filmtracks Publications. Audio clips can be heard using RealPlayer but cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 8/12/11, updated 8/12/11. Review Version 4.1 - PHP (Filmtracks Publications). Copyright © 2011-2013, Christian Clemmensen. All rights reserved. |
