Liman to Film Valerie Plame Story: Stumbles with Jumper

Just as we were getting ready to find a spot for Doug Liman amidst the big-budget technocrats who can still be dubbed auteurs, his Jumper has arrived and opens wide Friday. (He'll have a new direction to go with Valerie Plane's true-life tale, of which more below),

It's not that his action shooter's elan has deserted him. Although he's using comedy-schooled cinematographer Barry Petersen rather than Oliver Wood, who shot the propulsive Bourne Identity for him (and has been critiqued or making the subsequent two Bourne films, under Paul Greengrass, a little too kinetic), this film has a signature, jittery way of getting in your face. And he's got a touch for whammies-not least thanks to stunt maestro Simon Crane, who did Liman's Mr. and Mrs. Smith and a row of Bond pictures before shooting second unit on this film. But what he doesn't have here is the first Bourne's Tony Gilroy script (nor even the canny wit that writer Simon Kinberg, co-credited here, brought to Mr. and Mrs. Smith). And thus, despite the presence of Hayden Christensen (a Star Wars grad and so good in smaller films like Life As A House and Shattered Glass that he could be said to be slumming in this visual effects explosion), deft Brit Jamie Bell, Sam Jackson (in one crazy chalk-colored wig), and a properly confused-seeming Rachel Bilson (no doubt exhausted as she commuted cross-continent to work on this simultaneously with her TV show The O.C.), we're given little chance to sit back and smell the characters. By the time the whole enterprise grinds to the sort of provisional halt that screams (wanna-be) sequel in the making, you're liable to feel righteously ticked off.

It's a chancy game to speculate that a director's personality has overridden a film, but Liman makes a point, in this New York Magazine profile, of letting us know he has a problem looking people in the eye. Sure enough, Christensen, who can be a usefully transparent actor, affects a slouchy, supercilious manner that makes you wish you, instead of him, were the one gifted with the power to vault from your kitchen to the Pyramids, Fiji or Big Ben in a heartbeat. He doesn't deserve it, nor even the sweet Bilson, although the down side is her Millie seems too dim and dithery to even do her day job of drawing beer in a noisy Ann Arbor bar. (Seems our hero grew up there, though neither his bitter dad (the forever-angry Michael Rooker) nor his mysterious (to duck a spoiler) mom, the and invariably effective if barely seen Diane Lane, taught him the value of a dollar. (Though he knows what to do with a backpack stuffed full of them--score with chicks. After all, he withdraws his mad money from bank vaults at will, no surcharge involved.)

In the New York profile, and a later interview with John Clark at Premiere.com, it's made clear that even people who once swore off Liman--as then Universal boss Stacey Snider did on the rough ride to reshoots that was Bourne Identity--have now drunk the Liman Kool-Aid and think all will henceforth be peachy. Surely the Fox bosses, taking advantage of his consenting to do this third part of what he calls his "sell-out trilogy", must have been pleased at the idea of getting him to make a sequel-ready (in other words, their Fantastic Four revisited) vehicle.

Liman, who got very lucky financially by pocketing most of the dough from his early surprise hit Swingers, is still an exec producer on the Bourne series and probably getting some nice checks. If Jumper sees a sequel, he stands to gain--but the problem is, beyond a late glimmer that Christensen's David character came by his alienated, slacker-cool remoteness honestly, we don't really care about him or his dust-covered (her dude wrecks whole buildings when he fights) girlfriend. This script was adapted from a novel about teenagers, but Fox advised Liman to age his charges eight years--no crime in that. But any movie in which my beloved Samuel Jackson simply induces a headache has lost its way, in this case for all the wrong reasons. When piqued. David will threaten to leave somebody chilling on top of Everest, which this film, with its 19 percent approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes and its snowy excuse for a denouement, also does.

Meanwhile, Liman has seized the chance to direct the adaptation of outed CIA agent Valerie Plame's memoir, Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House employing Nicole Kidman, who's been taking her lumps lately. They had planned to work together on Mr. and Mrs. Smith--that's right, if that happened, the Brangelina summit would have had to happen some other way--but Kidman, as producer Akiva Goldsman has recalled, was unavailable: "Stepford Wives promised to shoot well into the next century and so Nicole jumped ship."

It's a fairly compelling project for someone with Liman's biography--his dad Arthur is many peoples' idea of an American hero for his prosecutorial zeal during Iran Contra. As Publishrs' Weekly said of his book (which was less than scanty on his own family):

High-powered trial lawyer Liman became a face known to millions when, as chief counsel to the Senate committee investigating the Iran-Contra affair, he grilled Oliver North and John Poindexter in televised hearings. In this earnest, energetic autobiography, Liman, who died last year at 65, portrays a Reagan White House out of control, run by zealous aides. He lambastes the Reagan administration for its disdain for constitutional procedures and its use of covert actions circumventing our system of checks and balances.

Does anyone else hear a familiar buzzing in their ear underneath the Daddy worship during the Republican debates at the Reagan Library? In any event, the CIA of course much redacted certain juicy parts of Plame's manuscript, now doubtless known to Liman. How he'll deal with that is only hinted at in his quote to MTV:

I have a really, really insane take on how to tell it. It's so outrageous," Liman enthused. "Ultimately, I'd be doing something no one has ever done before. Therefore it's automatically appealing to me. I'm just starting to explore whether [what I have in mind] is even possible to do.

It sounds like Liman has his yellowcake assembled. But of course, without trying to hex Jumper as it enters the weekend up against a fairly tepid field including several iffy but audience-sucking Valentine's Day entrants, the last thing a maverick filmmaker needs is a major bomb.

(Samuel L. Jackson, Jamie Bell, Hayden Christensen, Doug Liman and Rachel Bilson at the New York premiere of Jumper; photo by Jason Kempin/WireImage)