: (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
had
all the trademarks of a franchise in the making, most obviously starting
with tremendous worldwide box office returns. But the production of
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
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
, 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.
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| Bias Check: |
For John Powell reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.28
(in 50 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.16
(in 52,492 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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