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The movie

  • Crazy is Cool: Griffin, the British Jumper from the movie, is an awesome machine in the eyes of many who watched the film, with the absurd attitude to match for it.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse: Griffin has the reputation to be far more popular than the main characters. His popularity resulted in a video game spinoff centered on him. Whether it's because he's such a Crazy-Prepared Badass or because he's played by Jamie Bell or both is your choice. Becomes Harsher in Hindsight when Jamie Bell revealed that he hated the production of the movie (More details on The Other Wiki).
  • Escapist Character: David is set up as one of these before the Paladins are introduced. Come on, who didn't see that film and imagine what it would be like to live that kind of life?
  • Fridge Horror: David leaves Roland at the end in a high cave deep in the Grand Canyon, far away from any tourists that might spot him and with no tools to climb down with. And Roland can't call for help, because his phone and any other devices he had on him just took an extended dunk in a river.... so unless Roland has a tracking device inside his body, he's been condemned to a slow, agonizing death of starvation or exposure. What was that about not all Jumpers being evil, David?
  • Ho Yay: More than a few viewers have been noted to enjoy this trope between David and Griffin, only to be stymied by that tagalong Millie who just keeps getting in the way.
  • Magnificent Bastard: Griffin O'Conner is an experienced Jumper who has dedicated his life to eluding and killing Paladins, particularly Roland who killed his parents at a young age. Upon meeting fellow Jumper David Rice, who is pursued by Paladins, Griffin showcases his skill by effortlessly murdering the Paladins, before becoming the less experienced David's Cynical Mentor. Griffin immediately realizes when David compromises his base, knowing the Paladins possessed machines that kept a jump scar open. Engaging Roland, Griffin holds him off with a combination of his weapons and his Weaponized Teleportation, including throwing a bus at Roland, forcing Roland to flee back through the portal and Griffin trapping him back on the other side, planning to send a bomb through to kill the Paladins and anyone caught in the blast radius.
  • Memetic Mutation: Given that the main protagonist and antagonist are portrayed by Hayden Christensen and Samuel L. Jackson respectively, the scene where Roland attacks David is often viewed as Mace Windu getting revenge against Anakin Skywalker. As seen in video.
  • Moral Event Horizon: Roland promising to send Griffin "home to mommy" is the moment when you realize that he truly is as much of an iredeemable monster as any evil Jumper he ever fought.
  • The Problem with Licensed Games: Jumper: Griffin's Story is an Obvious Beta if there ever was one, with too many Game Breaking Bugs to count. It hurts all the more for What Could Have Been — Jamie Bell voiced the cutscenes quite well, and the teleporting mechanic came within a hair's-breadth of being fun. Being rushed to market to meet the movie's opening date ruined it.
  • Retroactive Recognition: Before she was shot into international stardom with Twilight, Kristen Stewart played David's younger half-sister, just eight months before the release of the first Twilight film.
  • Strangled by the Red String: Related to the above, but Hayden Christensen and Rachel Bilson really don't have a lot of chemistry together in their roles as David and Millie, and Millie herself comes across as a bit of a third wheel.
  • Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The movie adaptation. Depending on how you ask, some people might be slightly sympathetic to the antagonists, though ultimately neither side is composed of adjusted, decent human beings.
  • Unintentionally Unsympathetic: David's mother is revealed to be one of the leaders of the Paladins, the same group that's been slaughtering Jumpers and their families for possibly carrying the bloodline to be a Jumper. In response she abandoned David for his safety to be neglected and abused by her husband before going off and having a Replacement Goldfish daughter with someone else in solitude when her daughter could have easily been born a Jumper like David. All of this ends up making her actions come off as a mixture of Useless Bystander Parent and Hypocrite instead of sympathetic.
  • Unpopular Popular Character: Despite becoming a Broken Pedestal, Griffin more or less stole the show from main hero David in the eyes of viewers, to the point where he got both a book and a video game based around his adventures. David, by contrast, had to content himself with one measly prequel comic.
  • The Woobie: David at the beginning of the movie. His father later on, who is genuinely repentant and misses his son.

The book

  • Anvilicious: If you drink, join AA. If you know, are related to, or brush someone on the street who drinks, make them join AA and join Al-Anon yourself. In the later Cent novels, feminism takes the place of substance abuse as the author's pet cause of choice.
  • Audience-Alienating Era: Readers who are not fans of the Cent duology consider it to be one of these, as the Nebulous Evil Organization built up in Reflex suffers from strong Villain Decay without much buildup and the two main characters of the first books, Davy and Millie, are essentially static backdrops to the story of their child, Cent. It is likely this is why the TV series inspired by the third book, Impulse (2018) ended up going with an Original Character and plot, rather than adapting the events of these books, and instead took inspiration from plot points in the earlier books.
  • Base-Breaking Character: Davey and Millie's daughter Cent has proven a rather divisive entry to the series. On the one hand, her introduction extended extended the story into a new generation with new teleportation techniques, jumping going public, and the conspiracy from the second book getting defeated. The space travel via teleportation in the fourth book in particular is considered well developed. On the other hand, Cent herself is viewed as a Creator's Pet who is both overpowered and underchallenged. She single-handedly defeats said conspiracy (which failed to consider their containment systems susceptibility to vacuum despite Cent publicly going to space for several months and had its sole head show himself for no apparent reason after being extremely careful to maintain multiple layers of separation beforehand). She also develops a new acceleration technique (the aforementioned space travel), serves as a mouthpiece for Gould's own views on identity politics, and goes public with their mortal secret with almost no consultation with the previous main characters (her parents), who are reduced to secondary cheerleaders. This last particularly sticks in the craws of some readers, as the Character Focus of the final two novels that complete the series focuses on Cent exclusively.
  • Creator's Pet: Author Gould is rather clearly enamored of his Legacy Character Cent in the third and fourth books, making her a mouthpiece for his political views to a much greater degree than Davy or Millie ever were. The reception of Cent was rather a bit mixed because of this, as noted above.
  • Franchise Original Sin: Most of the things that made Cent into a Base-Breaking Character were there in David as early as Jumper. The use of him as an authorial mouthpiece, his effortless success both at getting rich and later dealing with terrorists through his power, and his constant development of new applications for his power. But it's not as obnoxious because David is shown to be a flawed and morally-ambiguous individual. His money comes from a bank robbery, he makes several mistakes that nearly land him in jail, and even when he does superheroics, he remains essentially an ordinary teenager who happens to have powers. Cent starts as a Plucky Girl and only goes up from there, takes her father's brilliance literally into space, and whenever things go badly for her, it's never her fault - always someone else mucking things up. Accordingly, readers who dislike her see her as much more obnoxious than David, particularly when she's used for an Author Filibuster.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: The back half of Jumper is centered around Davy interceding in hijackings, which happen every few weeks. This was indeed a reasonably common event in the real world at the time of publishing, due to lax security and generally being viewed as hostage taking on a larger scale. 9/11 put a hard brake on their frequency, with upgraded security and crew and passengers unwilling to cede control to anyone for fear of getting flown into a building. There's even a specific incident where Davy repeatedly drops a plane-hijacking terrorist from the World Trade Center to return the terror.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: The mechanics of the jumping are remarkably similar to the FTL jumps on Battlestar Galactica (2003).
  • The Woobie: David, in the book. Millie finds him cute for it.

The Freeware Game

  • Awesome Music: The final boss theme from Jumper 2 and its remix in Jumper Redux.
  • Breather Level: Oddly enough for one so late in the game, 7-4 in Jumper 1. Yeah, there's a lot of spikes, but there's also a lot of golden arrows that'll renew your Double Jump.
  • Retroactive Recognition: This being the first in a list of many precision platformers spearheaded by Maddy Thorson, of Celeste fame, puts the Jumper trilogy in a position of historical intrigue.
  • That One Level: Maze levels are by far the most difficult levels in an already Nintendo Hard game, requiring you to navigate a whole level jumping, with little to no breaks. It's possible to have less deaths in Chapter 5 than Chapter 4 or 3 due to it not having one.

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