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Jumper

After cementing Matt Damon as an action star, and establishing with Pitt and Jolie that star wattage still means something beyond tabloid sales, Liman decided to ditch the A-list leads for his third studio feature. The film is a sci-fi adventure (a first for Liman) about a teleporting 20-something who traverses the globe, narrowly evading a ruthless organization that tries to stop these "jumpers" from enjoying their threatening talents. The leads went to wooden starlets Hayden Christianson and Rachel Bilson (of Star Wars and OC fame), with the limited star-power really coming from a supporting and scenery-chewing Samuel L. Jackson.

Despite the lower-profile leads, Jumper still opened well, matching Bourne's $27 million opening weekend (with higher ticket prices padding the gross). This time around however, word-of-mouth couldn't propel Liman back into the century club for the third straight time – the movie topped out with an underwhelming $80 million – $5 million less than its budget. The outing was cushioned, perhaps, by an impressive foreign cume of $142 million, but even still, Jumper was a notable step down both in gross and critical response for Liman.

Where Bourne and Smith were shiny and creative, Jumper proved to be mostly just shiny. Perhaps this wasn't a real surprise to Liman, who admitted himself in the same New York Magazine interview preceding the film's release that Jumper "completes my sellout trilogy" – apparently he too was becoming disillusioned with the studio products he was churning out.

Fair Game

So what's next for the often irreverent, always exciting director? For his next feature, Liman will be tackling a project with more weight and substance than any of his previous films. Fair Game will attempt to recreate the true story of former CIA agent Valerie Plame and her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson. The story focuses on the notorious 2003 scandal that unraveled as White House officials revealed Plame's CIA status after Wilson wrote a controversial New York Times editorial about Bush's agenda in Iraq.

Fair Game, interestingly, returns Liman to the spy sub-genre – not a big surprise given that Bourne and Mr. & Mrs. Smith are his two biggest commercial hits by far. That said, Fair Game has the makings of a tense drama, not of a shoot 'em up blockbluster. This is also Liman's first "true story" film, and while, like all true stories as told by Hollywood, it will including certain measures of speculation, it will nonetheless force Liman to ground his film in reality (a first since he directed Go in 1998).

Fair Game's lofty and socially relevant material automatically conjures up premature thoughts of Oscar. It should come as no surprise, then, that the Plames will be played by none other than Academy stalwarts Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman. Expect the prestige campaign to come on strong as the release date approaches.

Doug Liman has, self-admittedly, spent the last decade making a trio of easily definable and commercial studio projects – even if the first two were higher-grade, middle-brow entertainment. With just five major titles to his resume, Liman has managed to direct four very memorable post-modern films. With Fair Game, Liman is aspiring to something loftier than anything he has done before, and as audience members we can only hope he succeeds.

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