On paper, at least, “Abduction” seems like a story Alfred Hitchcock would have loved: It’s about a young man who finds out his entire life has been a lie and who’s then forced to become a fugitive, unable to trust either the government agents or the foreign thugs who are chasing him, and the story climaxes at a crowded baseball stadium.
But director John Singleton is no Alfred Hitchcock. And even if he were, what would Hitchcock do with Taylor Lautner?
It’s too early in Lautner’s career to judge whether he’s going to blossom from box-of-kittens-adorable teen dream to actual actor, but movies as wispy as “Abduction” aren’t going to help him get there.
Lautner stars as Nathan, a rambunctious high-school senior who’s got anger issues, not to mention a recurring dream about watching a woman get abducted. His parents Kevin (Jason Isaacs) and Mara (Maria Bello) are tough but loving — Kevin makes a hungover Nathan spar with him in the backyard and…
Wait a minute — we’re supposed to believe the fair-complected Isaacs and Bello gave birth to the dark Lautner? Well, no. Nathan finds his picture on a missing children website, only to discover that he’s accidentally tipped off the Serbian mobsters who’ve been looking for him for years. Isaacs and Bello are CIA agents who have been protecting Nathan — even Nathan’s shrink (Sigourney Weaver) is an undercover agent — and his real dad has a list of rogue spooks (there’s your Hitchcockian MacGuffin plot device) that the Serbs want.
Before anyone can catch their breath, the bad guys have offed Nathan’s adoptive parents and blown up their house, and he’s running from both the Serbs and CIA honcho Burton (Alfred Molina), whom Nathan doesn’t entirely trust. Along for the ride is Karen (Lily Collins), the literal girl next door, who proves herself to be spectacularly useless, even by action-movie-chick-sidekick standards.
“Abduction” might have worked had Singleton and screenwriter Shawn Christensen had treated this more as a teen lark, but they’ve decided to make the movie as “Bourne” as possible. And if there’s one thing that Lautner can’t quite pull off yet, it’s gravitas. (His self-mocking cameo in “Valentine’s Day” was one of that film’s only amusing moments, so playing to his comic side might well have worked.)
Singleton surrounds his star with a cast of vets, but it’s left to Lautner to be heartbroken and vengeance-driven and haunted, and it all feels just a bit out of his skill set.
Still, the action moments pop, from the big finale at a Pittsburgh Pirates game to a mano-a-mano fistfight on an Amtrak train. The latter, incidentally, illustrates a uniquely American brand of filmmaking that assumes everyone watching is a complete idiot — the fight is intercut with flashbacks of Kevin teaching Nathan boxing strategy, but in the very next scene, Nathan has to explain to Karen, “He was preparing me all along.” Yes, movie, thank you, we get it. Move it along.
While “Abduction” isn’t the fiasco that “Twilight” haters might have been eagerly awaiting, it’s as unmemorable as they come. But at least it’s better than the Robert Pattinson 9/11 misfire “Remember Me,” so Lautner can still hold his head high at the “Breaking Dawn” premiere party.
