JUMPER (2008) **
There’s no better place in the world to see a movie than at a drive-in. I felt my drive-in epiphany at the tender age of five when my dad took me to see a double feature of Mortuary and Mausoleum. When I saw Bobbie Bresee’s breasts grow faces and chow down on Marjoe Gortner, well I was a changed man. I never forgot that experience and hopefully everyone reading this will also feel like that at least once in their lives. What makes the drive-in great is the fact that you do get two movies for the price of one. It’s even better when the movies have a common theme. (Like Mortuary and Mausoleum. Both films featured people getting butchered in places known for their ample cadaver storage.) This week, I went up to The Diamond State Drive-In, the last remaining drive-in in
For starters they both have one word titles.
Okay, that’s about all they have in common.
Jumper may never win any Video Vacuum Awards, but just the fact that I saw this mess at the drive-in probably added a star or more to it’s rating.
Jumper is all about how Hayden Christensen can teleport himself all over the world. He has the ability to teleport (or “jump”) to Rome in the morning, teleport to Egypt and chow down on a Wawa sub on top of the Sphinx at noon, jump on over to London and hang out at Big Ben, and still be back home for dinner.
Unfortunately with all his power, he couldn’t teleport himself into a better movie.
Then Samuel L. Jackson enters the picture as a “Paladin”, a guy who hunts down Jumpers and kills them with a giant Bowie knife. (Usually
There’s only two places in the world where a movie this stupid actually works. One is on the Sci-Fi Channel (where this flick is bound to end up in a year or so) and the other is the drive-in. Teleporting teenagers being chased by tired looking character actors is just easier to accept when you’re under the stars sitting behind the steering wheel of your trusty Cavalier.
Actually, the flick wasn’t half bad until they introduced Hayden’s thoroughly annoying British sidekick and the plot starting jumping around more than the characters did. It also lost points for the tame love scene between Hayden and Bilson. The movie was PG-13 so the filmmakers completely ignored the possibilities of teleportation sex (AKA: “Jumping” her bones).
Even though the sidekick was grating on my last nerve, at least he got the movie’s best line when he said: “If it moves, I can jump it!”
Then Rambo started up. I love this movie. This was my second go-round with it (I already saw it on opening night about three months ago) and if there was ever a better (recent) movie to see at a drive-in, then I sure can’t think of one. Rambo may be my favorite of the series, and seeing it at the drive-in only made it that much better.
It’s hard for me to single out what makes Rambo so great.
It might be the scene where Rambo decapitates a Burmese soldier with a homemade machete, giving a new meaning to the term “Burma Shave”.
Perhaps it’s when Rambo tore a dude’s throat out Road House style.
Or when Rambo ripped the child molester general’s guts out and they spilled all over the forest.
Could it be the scene where the villains make innocent farmers run the 100 yard dash thorough a minefield?
Or the scene where Rambo single-handedly mowed down half of
Maybe it was the part when Rambo snuck up on two soldiers and shot them with a machine gun at point blank range, turning them into human Jackson Pollack paintings.
I could go on, but what’s the point? Faithful readers will already know that Rambo is Number One with a bullet (make that ten thousand bullets) on the Video Vacuum Top Ten for ‘08.
All I’m going to say is that there are few things more American than watching a Rambo movie at a drive-in.
Speaking of the drive-in, there is a terrible crime being perpetrated on American soil. There’s a bunch of greedy land developers that want to tear the Diamond State Drive-In down and put up condominiums. Just like the evil Burmese soldiers in the movie, these people want to rape and pillage something decent and good and use it for their own debauched desires. Like Rambo, we the drive-in going audience must combat the evil, not by ripping people’s throats out, but by supporting the drive-in regularly. For information on how you can help, check out www.dsdit.com for more details.