Grazing Rites

As I said when I left the theatre, “I like any movie that has Hayden Christiansen getting beat down like a little girl“.

I think the plot was a little unfocused. The jumper/paladin conflict was a little too simple, handled a little too casually. There’s a group of people who want to kill us? Okay. My mom’s one of them? Okay. The only reason is religion, it seems a painfully simplistic allegory for world conflict. Need a reason to kill each other? Just throw religion in. This resulted in a sadly one-dimensional character and performance from the otherwise great (and prolific!) Samuel L. Jackson.

Bonus points for use of The Tragically Hip, specifically Ahead By A Century.

Here’s how I would have done it…

Jackson’s character is NSA and has been trying to recruit a jumper for years. They always say no. When they do he kills them, regretfully, because they’re a security threat he can’t protect against. He tries to recruit Hayden’s character and he asks for some time to think it over. Jackson gives him time because it’s the first time he got to a jumper before he realized he wasn’t alone.

Hayden thinks about it and decides he’d like to be a superhero and agrees to work with Jackson. His first assignment is to kill a terrorist. He argues in favour of capturing rather than killing but Jackson says it’s too much of a risk. The ‘terrorist’ turns out to be the other jumper, we’ll keep him the same because he was pretty cool. The other jumper explains Jackson’s normal recruitment tactics.

Near the end of their conversation, after Hayden gives up Jackson’s current location to the other jumper, some crisis breaks out. Hayden decides to save the innocent while the other jumper and Jackson fight to a stalemate. After the incident Hayden decides to join neither side in the conflict as Jackson’s methods are too violent and the other jumper was so focused on his grudge with Jackson he was content to let innocents die.

Drop hints that his mom is NSA so you can follow up on that plot line in the sequel.

Bam, there you go. Better movie and potential franchise.

Jon agrees.

This entry was posted on March 22, 2008 at 12:15 am and is filed under Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.