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BY ABIGAIL GRABER

In print | Published March 20, 2008 — Updated August 28, 2008 14:50

Spring Break may be officially over, but for many of us, one week was entirely too little time to secure the necessary levels of brain-rot we require to sustain ourselves through two more months of rigorous academia in the Swat Bubble. Don’t cave in to intellectual pressure — help is available. Just a few short hours in a movie theater can do to your cranial capacity what an entire seven days of non-stop drunken debauchery in Tijuana failed to achieve.

Now, March is upon us, which means that Hollywood has provided the usual array of moldy leftovers released just in time to be swiftly forgotten before the summer movie season kicks in. All across L.A., studio execs are praying that no one remembers “College Road Trip” when the next awards season rolls around. You may be tempted to stray into “10,000 B.C.,” possibly the best unintentionally funny movie since “Constantine.” “10,000 B.C.” does contain silly dialogue, spew forth hopelessly rote plot devices and operate on the he-who-has-the-longest-fingernails-is-most-evil theory of villain-crafting. However, some of the action sequences border on entertaining. There is worse available.

There is “Jumper.”

Plot: There are people who can teleport.

Characters: There are people who can teleport.

Dialogue: There are people who can teleport.

The good: It’s short. Clocking in at just under 90 minutes, “Jumper” lends viewers the sweet assurance that, at any point during their viewing experience, the pain will all be over soon.

The bad: Hayden Christensen once again exercises his monopoly on the whiny white boy character market as David, a whiny white boy who discovers his destiny as the greatest and most terrifying Jedi — no sorry, a whiny white boy who fabricates stories for “The New Republic” — uh, no, wrong again, a whiny white boy who discovers he can teleport and uses this power to grow up into a whiny white man who feels entitled to other people’s bank accounts, an uber-hip penthouse filled with gadgetry so trendy it fell into planned obsolescence before it was invented and his high-school crush, Millie (Rachel Bilson). Since David literally teleports over to his remote control when it lies just out of reach, we are left to wonder how he grew up into the ripped physique of Hayden Christensen. Seth Rogen, equally whiny in “Knocked Up,” seems more appropriately rotund.

Millie, for her part, despite having believed David to be dead for eight years, whisks off to Rome with him where, despite his obvious deceptions and creepily possessive and controlling behavior, she sleeps with him. David meets Griffin (Jamie Bell), another teleport, who is aggressively British and poorly written in that painful way that says that someone behind the typewriter has an inflated sense of their own hilarity. Samuel L. Jackson tries to kill everyone for reasons that are unclear, but have something to do with the Spanish Inquisition, and yet utterly fail to explain his horrible haircut.

When director Doug Liman finds this material too thin to support the development of the film beyond its preview, he tries to distract the audience by shaking the camera so much that we puke.

The ugly: For years we’ve been making excuses for Samuel L. Jackson. Well, Sammy J., the gig is up. After seeing this, this, oh I can’t bring myself to call it a movie, this frighteningly scarring collective hallucination, I am now prepared to declare that “Pulp Fiction” was the fluke and “Jumper” is the norm. Jackson is not a great actor who has made a couple of clunkers. He is a ponderous hack who for the last decade has been using our respect, predicated on one great role and his stylish sense in sunglasses and haberdashery to sell us the most appalling pieces of turtle poo ever to come to a theater near you. Remember how you saw the preview for “S.W.A.T.” and thought, “This is iffy, but Samuel L. Jackson is in it. How bad could it be?” Remember how suddenly attractive hara-kiri began to seem after only 90 minutes of “Unbreakable?” I rest my case on the following conversation I had with my father after our viewing of “Jumper”:

Me: Has Samuel L. Jackson done anything decent since 1994?

Dad: Sure, sure, he was in that movie, you know, the one with Mel Gibson.

Me: Lethal Weapon. Released in 1987. And that was Danny Glover.

Dad: Ah.

Me: …

Dad: …

Stick a fork in Mr. Jackson, he’s done.

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