Madonna – Jump (Video)

I caught this on MuchMusic last week and thought I would comment on it. First take a look for yourself; if you utterly detest Madonna hit the mute button but watch the guys jumping around.

First off I only recognize Sebastian Foucan who plays Molaka in the new movie Casino Royale (my review), if you can help identify more post a comment. Foucan has been working with Madonna quite a bit on this last album. I have seen videos of him on stage with her during the tour and he is also in another previous music video called Hung Up. He is taking Free-Running to the masses using multiple media.

As far as Parkour is concerned the video starts off pretty well. We see several young men in a city environment. The camera takes in the sweeping urban vistas which of course include 5-15 story roofs on which the guys are jumping; pretty standard in the media treatment of Parkour. The guys start jumping and the video kicks off to the beat of Madonna’s “dance”. The first major event of note is a rather large Tic-Tac-Drop at 0:20s. “Nice!” I verbalized upon first watching it, I was hooked, “I wonder other Parkour they will include?”.

The beat picks up and we see Foucan do an underbar on an Asian archway followed by a jump over a rail and then a drop down stairs. The scenes are all disconnected with widely varying camera positions so it doesn’t really flow that well. I think they actually wanted your focus on the Karate Kid head band instead. We then hit a pointless pole climb/dismount by a guy wearing very anime ninja styled pants and footwear. The chorus then comes in and we move through a few more jumps from height and almost miss a crazy underbar along the ground at 0:55s that I have now watched about 15 times. I can’t imagine he made it back to his feet afterwards. After this it is pretty much downhill into the Free-Running zone. Some of the notable things include: ariel drops, pointless tic-tacs, break-dancing on a car, back-flips, a front-flip, etc.

By the half way point of the video my knees started to twinge in sympathy. Check out 1:36s, 1:45s and especially 1:49s, ouch. Essentially Madonna is capitalizing on the cool factor of the guys jumping as most scenes are only quick clips of the first half of a jump. Even given all of this I can vouch for the effectiveness of video. I immediately wanted to get out and run. Music and exercise are becoming tighter and tighter as hardware vendors and marketing firms turn their full attention to pair. The Nike+ system I mention previously is a good indication of that. I think I am going to add this track to my MP3 player.