Jump tells the story of four twenty-somethings
whose lives collide one New Year’s Eve in Derry. It stars Nichola Burley as Greta a young girl
with a lot of personal problems. The film opens with her on the Derry Peace
Bridge debating whether
to jump off or not. We then get a flashback/flash-forward non linear narrative
telling us what led to this point.
Remember the Paul Haggis film Crash and the amount of times the same people kept on running into
each other? Well that annoyed the hell out of me and sometimes that kind of
contrived set up can put you off a film (Crash
had other major problems to be honest). Jump suffers from a similar fate.
Yes I know Derry is a little smaller than L.A.
but the likelihood of all the main characters continuously running into each
other is absurd. To say that the story is contrived is really an
understatement. Not only do the characters meet a lot but the ways they come
together are ridiculous. Worse than that, the intersections are major
plot points.
For some people this may be easier to get past but
this is not the only problem with Jump.
It attempts, unsuccessfully, to marry four distinct genres: the gangster film,
a drama, a comedy and a romance. This is impossibly ambitious and it fails on
nearly all accounts. The gangster story is clichéd and exhausting, the drama
which deals with suicide is underdeveloped. There are a few laughs to be had
but not as many as is needed. The central romance is, to give the film credit,
unconventional but its pacing is off and the resolution a little too neat in
how it sets up the final scene.
This is a film that I could see an undemanding
audience enjoy. It is easy on the eye as Derry
comes over as very photogenic. But Irish films have to be held to as high a
standard as any other. It is not enough to say it is OK ‘for an Irish film’. It
should be judged on whether or not it works as a whole. And in this case, it
does not. In fairness, it opens well with a great time lapse shot of the Peace Bridge
but quickly falls apart. I suspect that it will do well at the cinema. But that
will not make it a good film, sadly.
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