Abduction

Directed by John Singleton, Abduction follows teenager Nathan Harper (Taylor Lautner) as he discovers that his parents aren’t exactly who he thought they were – with this revelation triggering a pursuit involving CIA agents and evil Russian spies. The seemingly can’t-miss nature of the movie’s over-the-top premise is, at the outset, employed to decent effect by Singleton, as the filmmaker does a nice job of establishing the scenario and the various characters – with Lautner’s stiff, far-from-charismatic performance consequently not quite as problematic as one might’ve feared. (It is, however, fairly ridiculous to buy that his character honestly believed that Maria Bello and Jason Isaacs were his natural parents.) And although Singleton botches the movie’s first big action set-piece by overusing shaky camerawork, Abduction boasts a handful of genuinely exciting sequences and interludes that contribute heavily to the movie’s surprisingly watchable atmosphere (eg Nathan and a friend must escape from a hospital after assassins show up). It’s only as the film rolls into its distressingly low-key midsection that Abduction starts to lose its hold on the viewer, with Lautner’s ineffectual work ensuring that it’s more than a little difficult to work up much interest in his character’s more subdued exploits (eg his blossoming romance with Lily Collins’ Karen). The film does improve slightly in the buildup to its baseball-stadium-set finale, though, as expected, it’s become more than a little difficult to wholeheartedly care about the characters’ fates by this point. The end result is an almost-passable thriller that would’ve benefited from a much shorter running time, and it ultimately does seem as though Lautner is simply out of his depth when removed from the world of vampires and werewolves.

** out of ****