Walking through a parking lot the other day, I saw a bumper sticker that read “I’d Rather Be Snowboarding.” Over the years and up and down many a street, I have seen other similar ones—I’d rather be Drumming, Shopping, in Paris, On My Harley.

Truth be told, much of the time most of us would rather be somewhere else. We will the earth to swallow us up when we find ourselves in embarrassing situations. We dutifully think of our “happy place” when our shrink tells us to. And we lose half-hour blocks of time every day at work because somehow our mind ends up on a Hawaiian beach instead of inside our cubicle.

But the question becomes, if we could actually instantaneously go where we’d rather be, would that be a good thing? If escaping from danger, discontent, or embarrassment could be done with the flip of a switch, if transporting to happiness, success, and safety could be done in the blink of an eye, what exactly would that mean to who we are and the world in which we live?

And so begins the movie Jumper. David Rice (Hayden Christensen) is not exactly having the time of his life. As he tells us, his mother left him long ago, his father treats him no better than a dog chained in the backyard, and at school he is called “Rice Ball” and pushed around accordingly. When a confrontation with a fellow classmate leads to him falling into a frozen river, the situation only gets worse. But then all of sudden, David finds himself dripping wet and sprawled in the middle of the Ann Arbor Public Library.

Jump to a new reality where David can teleport to wherever he wants whenever he wants. Begin with a bank robbery to get his new life started. Skip forward eight years to a new life where David lives in a penthouse and stops in at a London bar, surfs Australasian waves, and eats breakfast on top of the Sphinx all in one morning. As David sees it, this is the life. But as we see him turn off a news segment about drowning victims who can only be saved by a miracle and head off for more barhopping and sightseeing, we also sense that something is off.

Cue the arrival of Roland (Samuel L. Jackson), the reality that David is not the only one of his kind, and the concept that there are those who do not believe “his kind” should be allowed to exist. As Roland puts it, “You are an abomination. Only God should have the power to be in all places at all times… Sooner or later you all go bad.”

Even though David hasn’t exactly been taking over the world for his evil purposes, you can see Roland’s concern. David did begin his new life by robbing a bank. With his power, he has pretty much been living outside of almost every law of mankind for a third of his life. Almost everything he does is motivated by nothing other than selfish ambition. Who’s to say that one day those selfish desires won’t involve, say, teleporting a nuclear weapon right on top of the White House?

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