We've all seen it and we've all said it - "The best stuff was in the preview." Jumper, the new action movie from 20th Century Fox and director Doug Liman, is ALL preview. Go to YouTube or Apple, watch the preview for Jumper, close your eyes, and imagine what comes in between all of the fancy CGI shots. Trust me, you won't be far off from writing the entire film in your head. Shockingly free of any surprise, character, or plot, Jumper feels like a movie that was produced with the trailer in mind and not much else. The writers and producers clearly created a creaky framework of a film around a few early pre-visualized set pieces and just enough of the high concept to make an appealing preview. What's so shocking about Jumper is that it has about as much storytelling as an online webisode of Lost. Much like The Golden Compass, Jumper aims to lure fans with what is obviously just an introduction to future chapters in the saga. As many reports have suggested, the foundation has already been laid for a possible trilogy. Would you pay full entree price for an appetizer? Well, Jumper is more like the bread you get before the waiter brings the appetizer to your table.

In Jumper, David Rice (Hayden Christensen) is the dorky kid in school until he's almost killed in a weird accident involving the school bully, a snow globe, and thin ice. As Rice struggles for air, he's instantly teleported to the Ann Arbor Library. Thanks to his near-death encounter, Rice discovers that he could leave all of his geeky pain behind and teleport wherever he wants (with stunningly on-the-nose dialogue like "Did I just teleport?" - subtlety is not one of Jumper's strong suits). Instead of zipping off to any number of places that you or I would immediately head to (anywhere from Skywalker Ranch to the cheerleader locker room of the Dallas Cowboys' for starters), David begins a life of robbing banks, one that also includes chilln' on the head of the Sphinx.

While David nonchalantly traverses the globe, funding his pursuits with stolen cash from different banks, the nefarious Roland (Samuel L. Jackson) and a group of "Paladins" track David and other "jumpers" who have the same ability. Why? That's one too many complicated questions, although the moustache-twirling villain Roland does spout a few lines about God being the only one who should be able to be everywhere. How do Paladins hope to enforce God's exclusive rights to teleportation? It turns out that massive jolts of electricity are the best way to stop a jumper, so Roland and his bizarrely-dressed team carry around giant tasers to keep their prey in place, which works for about ten seconds.

David escapes Roland's first attack and does the most nonsensical thing imaginable - he returns home to Ann Arbor to put his father (Michael Rooker) and his school-crush love interest (Rachel Bilson) in harm's way. While he's trying to impress his girl on a trip to Rome, David encounters fellow jumper Griffin (Jamie Bell), and the two argue over whether they should team up and take a stand against the Paladins or continue to run... I mean, jump.

Liman and his team stage a decent action sequence or two - the best being the teleportation of a double-decker bus - but if you look closely at the preview, you'll see a bit of almost every single action scene. It's a shockingly incomplete film, made all the more frustrating by a non-ending that simply introduces us to two new characters (who we won't spoil here). Christensen will undoubtedly take a lot of the blame for the general lack of charisma in Jumper, but I blame Liman and the script for somehow making even Samuel L. Jackson and the very-cute Rachel Bilson feel like nothing more than special effects. And not very good ones either.