Just Say No – Hayden Christensen as an Action Hero

You want proof that there’s no God. Want incontrovertible evidence that 99.9% of Hollywood executives have their heads so far up their rectums that they could read Variety through their urethra? Word has just come down that William Gibson’s classic cyberpunk novel Neuromancer is being made into a movie. No, that’s not the incriminating facet. It seems a certain talent free actor has been tapped to play the iconic role of Henry Dorsett Case. It’s a performer so pathetic he makes Keanu Reeves’ turns in the downright rip off Johnny Mnemonic look like the work of Sir Laurence Olivier. That’s right, everyone’s least favorite waste of Star Wars space, Hayden “One Broken Note” Christensen is rumored to be the front runner for the part. Apparently, it all depends on how his upcoming sci-fi spectacle does at the box office. Oh if only it were that easy.

In the realm of ridiculous action stardom, where for every Bruce Willis we have a dozen Nicolas Cages, sulking Skywaker is the absolute worst choice no matter the role. He’s dead eyed and uninvolving, like a trip to the zoo the day after the animals committed suicide. Since Tinsel Town usually thinks with its wallet first, crotch second, and aesthetics dead last, it’s no surprise that this Canadian klutz keeps getting hired. George Lucas’ lamentable prequels made a mint, and the last time anyone checked, Christensen is still riding that rail all the way to the next casting call. Who cares if he was laughably bad as a kind-of Bob Dylan in Factory Girl? It doesn’t matter that Awaken took a dirt nap at the turnstiles. With only a few warm notices for his work in Shattered Glass, he’s a hack of happenstance, someone with more luck than the entire Hilton clan put together.

So he’s perfect to fill the steroid stretched shoes of past punch and jurists. There is definitely a more brain addled Schwarzenegger element to his work, a thinking as his second language aspect that makes him incredibly blah onscreen. Even better, Christensen loves to accent that plainness by tossing out random drawls. Sometimes, he’s from Texas. At other moments, he’s a native New Yorker. And then there are times when his stilted speaking style suggests a medieval knight dropped on his head one too many times. Placing him in a period piece – and what else is the Wars universe except one big backlot recreation of reality where the digital replaces dysentery – allows the so called actor to prove his patheticness. He indeed suffers from one of those telling talent atrophies – the “m’lady” syndrome.

By its very nature, Old English is supposed to suggest history. Contemporize any of this dialogue and you destroy the illusion almost instantly. Certain known names have struggled with m’lady’s speechifying malady – Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Harvey Keitel…basically any Method icon of the last 30 years. But no one is as uncomfortable as Christensen. All throughout the prequels, whenever called upon to address his paramour Padme, his painful approach to titles of recognition made him sound like a stroke victim relearning words all over again. It was even worse in Factory Girl, when his faux Zimmerman poet was seemingly reduced to a junior high nerd phonetically stumbling over multi-syllable vocabulary words.

But all occupational therapy aside, Christensen’s biggest flaw is his abject lack of magnetism. Actually, he does own some performance polarization. The minute the lens hits him, the lack of ability automatically repels the camera. This is crystal clear from his work in Doug Liman’s lamentable Jumper. With a premise that promises more than its horribly hackneyed cast can provide, this sloppy sci-fi stinker weeps at the throne of previous speculative spectacles. It’s not just that the Bourne Identity/Mr. and Mrs. Smith director decimates a concept with a great deal of potential, but somehow, he let Christensen on the set to add insult to stupidity.

Jumper is by far the worst work in the actor’s already dismal canon. We are supposed to believe that a shy, geeky like dork who pines for a girl he’ll never impress discovers his secret ability to teleport, leaves his abusive home, robs a bank, and becomes a jet setting playboy who eventually gets said gal. Right. The internal logic links that fail along the way from plot point A to B are enough to undermine the entire structural integrity of cinema. Even worse, Christensen’s character is fashioned into a pouty anti-hero, the kind of smug, “do anything” dude who can threaten the lives of hundreds, commit all manner of thought and actual crime, and yet feel absolutely ambivalent about the risk and/or ethics.

The rest of the narrative is a knotty combination of unexplained context (as a ‘jumper’, Christensen’s David Rice is born with an inherent enemy, the fierce fundamentalist ‘paladins’ led by Samuel L. “Mail Me That Script” Jackson) and misfired stunt sequences. It’s clear from the work behind the scenes that Liman is a little light in the white knuckle, edge of the seat kinetic loafers. A chase through various locations around the globe – including several vertical and horizontal shifts – should be more exciting .Instead, it often plays like a gerbil having a seizure on the editing button. Besides, Liman approved Christensen (as well as his biological alter ego, the OC awful Rachel Bilson) for his lead. Clearly, the man has limited intellectual or aesthetic capacity.

The main facet of the film’s premise is something called a bi-location scar. It’s like a black hole in temporal space that sucks in the ‘jumper’, instantly transporting him or her to a designated place in their mind. Christensen’s deficient daring-do functions in the same way. The minute he appears in a scene, entertainment and all sense of believability are leeched out of the material, replaced by a void of uninspired dullness. You can literally see the CGI skipping pixels and dying a digital death. From his Terminator as turd crewcut to the dark circles around his Satanically slack eyeballs, Christensen commands a certain surreal kind of respect. It’s not based on what he does as a celebrity. Instead, we marvel at how completely insidious and vile true evil can really be.

Now some may believe that this is too much hating on a half-shaped hunk who really didn’t ask to be George Lucas’ whelp of a whipping boy. They will point out decent things he’d done (look for the list to be about one item long) and suggest that more time in front of the Panaflex is needed. Eventually, they say, he will produce some interesting work. Frankly, that’s a lot like the whole monkey and typewriter analogy, except that the chimps have more of a chance at channeling Shakespeare than Christensen does. This is why his hiring (make that ‘proposed’ hiring) to play Case seems so senseless. It’s a reach far beyond his already proven paltriness. Besides, it dooms Neuromancer before it even begins, leading those already familiar with Gibson’s pioneering novel to fear the worst (the ‘who’s who’ for Molly Millions is enough to give purists nightmares now).

And that’s because Christensen, for all the snark, has yet to prove himself anything other than an incredibly lucky bastard. Had an irradiated lemur been cast as Anakin Skywalker, the prosimian would have his choice of starring roles. Money and cultural meaning can do that to any actor. Sadly, it’s the audiences who will have to suffer with such cinematic strategizing. Jumper will not add to the actors’ legitimacy, except when it comes to putting pesos in the suits’ pockets. Few will recognize it’s the premise doing the profiteering. Instead, Christensen will get all the decidedly incorrect credit. And our long national acting night terror will continue.