Director: John Singleton
Stars: Taylor Lautner, Lily Collins, Sigourney Weaver, Alfred Molina, Jason Isaacs
Screening: general release
Rating: *
OH. My. God. Twilight wolf boy Taylor Lautner is SO hot. And he’s, like, SUCH a good actor.
And it’s not just about the abs, you know.
It’s in THE WAY he takes his shirt off. It’s like he really, really means it.
Talk about smouldering in all the right places!
But he’s good with his tight white T-shirt on, too. And so sincere.
In Abduction, when his parents are murdered in front of him and his house is blown to smithereens by a bomb in the oven, he looks really upset.
There’s a tear stain on his tanned cheek and everything. Plus no zits, which is a bonus. And he has a shirt on through the whole thing.
Then, 15 minutes later, when he hooks up with the cute girl from across the street: he has his shirt on again and it’s still way hot.
At first, he is kind of shy and awkward around her and she’s not even prettier than he is. To think Taylor Lautner would get with a girl who’s only OK-looking and kind of plain – that makes him even more adorable.
When the two of them go on the run from the bad guys who planted the oven bomb, they sneak onto a train to Nebraska or somewhere and start making out. As you do when you are an adolescent Adonis hiding in a sleeping compartment with a chick.
It’s as if he’s completely forgotten his one-tear grief of losing his mum and dad and house and his closet full of white T-shirts.
But then the romance is interrupted by a baddie with a gun who obviously doesn’t care at all about how gorgeous Taylor is: he just starts bashing into him. NO, NOT THE FACE!
Yes, you have to make your own fun while watching Abduction. Unless, of course, you are a 14-year-old girl hanging out for the next Twilight movie. Or her mum.
In which case, Abduction – let’s cut the niceties and call it what it is, Abs-duction – has been Taylor-made for you.
This is Lautner’s first bid for screen cred beyond the vampire-versus-werewolf love triangle of the blockbuster Twilight franchise.
But it’s a colour-by-numbers espionage thriller that is likely to satisfy only card-carrying members of Team Jacob.
Here, Lautner plays an all-American teenager named Nathan, who is shocked to find his baby photo on a missing persons website.
Turns out Nathan’s life is not as it seems. But before he can confront his parents (Jason Isaacs and Maria Bello), bad guys with guns storm his house and pop a bomb in the oven.
Fleeing the fireball with neighbour and study buddy Karen (Lily Collins), Nathan must unravel the mystery of his identity as he dodges the CIA (led by Alfred Molina in a suit) and gunmen with scary foreign accents (led by Michael Nyqvist from The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo movies).
Like Lautner, this movie desperately wants to be taken seriously. But the action is limp, the acting is lame and the humourless dialogue is laughable as it veers erratically from the inane to the preposterous.
Even Sigourney Weaver, playing the shrink helping Nathan with his anger issues and unexplained flashbacks to childhood trauma, can’t redeem a script so silly that characters actually say things like ‘‘there’s a bomb in the oven’’ and ‘‘yesterday we were just a couple of high school kids’’.
Collins (daughter of musician Phil Collins) is boring and plain – which serves to make Lautner look even prettier and give every palpitating Twihard in the audience hope.
Cashing in on Lautner’s heart-throb-of-the-minute status, director John Singleton pays special attention to his name-above-the-title star’s main body of work: that is, the pecs, the abs, the gleaming orthodontics and the abs.
Abduction’s junior Bourne Identity-on-a-budget formula of fights and chases doesn’t require Lautner to flex his acting muscles much.
Or maybe it does. It’s hard to tell because, as canvases go, Lautner is pretty blank. His facial expressions are limited to two: smoulder and smile.
But, boy, he looks good on a motorbike.
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