Abduction (2011, Taylor Lautner, Lily Collins)
Ugghh. It becomes apparent from very early on that this film by director John Singleton is aimed squarely at the teen set, what with supposed heartthrob Lautner — of the Twilight series fame — starring as a high school senior with troubles. But please! Give the world's teens a little more credit to appreciate real dialog and plot! From the first scene the film is about as flat as a sheet of plywood, and Lautner's performance is even less interesting. His facial expression — through the discovery of the real identity of his parents, to witnessing their murders, to escaping his would-be captors, to facing his foes — never waivers from a mild sense of confusion and having just caught a whiff of an unpleasant odor.
Lautner portrays Nathan, a privileged teen with no apparent problems, even though the script alludes to some that Lautner's perpetually blank expression doesn't convey. He has a seemingly brutal father who routinely (it would seem) kicks the crap out of him in full-contact style boxing bouts, but who also seems like a swell guy. Nathan discovers a web site that causes him to suspect that he may have been abducted as a toddler, and that his parents really aren't his parents. Suddenly people show up and kill his parents, and Nathan is on the run with his across-the-street neighbor and would-be girlfriend, Karen (Collins). Nathan is eventually surrounded by — and surrenders (albeit momentarily) to — a cadre of CIA agents, led by Agent Burton (Alfred Molina), and cleverly listens to Burton spell out every detail about Nathan's surrogate parents, about his birth parents, and about why so many people are after him. Then, in a subsequent moment of astounding clarity, Nathan realizes aloud to Karen that his father, in duking it out with him regularly, was preparing him for the situation in which he finds himself. Hello. We were there 35 minutes ago, Nathan. Another moment of brilliance, in a later search for his birth mother, Nathan deduces, since the directions to the address he has for her have led them to a cemetery, that she is dead. As Nathan is chased by two sets of spies vying for information they think he possesses, the plot reaches its height(?) at a Pittsburgh Pirates home game at PNC Park. If that's not ironic metaphor for lameness in film making, then no such thing exists.
The plot is about as clever as a coloring book maze, with dialogue seemingly written for the "Dick and Jane" set. Even veteran actress Sigourney Weaver — whose casting here suggests she must have lost a bet — as Nathan's therapist (or IS she...?), delivers her lines so deliberately that recent stroke victims would be shouting at her to spit it out.
Michael Nyqvist, who also portrayed affable good-guy Michael Blomqvist in the excellent, original, Swedish The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo film trilogy, shoots himself in the foot as the villain Kozlow. Perhaps he earned too warm a spot in this film goer's heart as Tattoo's Blomqvist, but he is neither convincing nor fearsome in this effort.
Nothing in this film appears to have been done by anyone who was trying very hard. The editing appears as though done by someone in an extreme hurry, perhaps to move on to his next film while quietly forgetting to include this one on his résumé.
In fact, the only thing this film actually earns is its rating of 2.0 on the Numb Butt-Cheeks® scale.* Even if it's free, spend money on something that might actually be worth your time, instead.
*The Numb Butt-Cheeks® scale of zero to ten: a Numb Butt-Cheeks rating of zero indicates such a disregard for the film that one could get up to go to the bathroom at any point without worry of missing anything exciting or important; a Numb Butt-Cheeks rating of ten indicates there is no way one would get up and leave, save for a distinct tearing of bladder tissue.
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