Fridae

After shooting to fame playing a second banana role as Jacob Black in the Twilight Saga, Taylor Lautner is apparently looking for a vehicle that he can truly call his own. With Abduction, Lautner transforms into an International Boy of Mystery in what is apparently a spy thriller for teenagers.

Nathan (Lautner) is an ordinary teenage boy like another, a fun-loving daredevil of a teen who seems to want nothing more than to party with his friends, take part in school athletics as a wrestler, and get his homework done with his hot neighbour Karen (Lily Collins), whom he has a long-standing crush on. However, he is also troubled by a hazy memory involving a woman being killed before his eyes. When he is not doing any of his normal teenager things, spends his time brooding soulfully as he confesses his feelings of alienation in the office of his therapist (Sigourney Weaver), who dismisses all his memories as bad dreams.

The key to his dream may however lie in an online website detailing missing children, one of whom seems to bear an uncanny resemblance to him. How unfortunate that he came across this site while researching with Karen for a sociology project, for before long he’s on the run from strange Eastern European assassins who kill his parents, an FBI superspook Frank Burton (Alfred Molina) who claims to be his friend, and his therapist, who not only turns out to be another secret agent but also warns him not to trust anyone! Karen is along for the ride as someone Nathan can rescue and make out with. To think none of this would have happened if Nathan and Karen had chosen to do a school project on volcanoes instead of missing children.

The way that the plot unfolds is instantly predictable and probably chickenfeed for anyone familiar with the conventions of spy thrillers like the Bourne trilogy. There are the usual conspiracies, double-crosses and shadowy operators, but Shawn Christensen’s script is not eager to channel Robert Ludlum, let alone John Le Carre. It’s geared firmly at those under 20, with the requisite teen angst and coming-of-age themes that were also prevalent in Twilight. Lautner still comes off, as in those films, as a poor man’s Brando, trying hard to capture the thin voice, slightly mumbling delivery and vague sense of uncertainty that was Brando’s trademark, and coming off mostly awkward. That he and Lily Collins, two of the blandest actors in the film, are the central couple, yet surrounded by fine character actors like Sigourney Weaver and Alfred Molina is probably its most frustrating aspect. You’d rather watch a movie involving the supporting cast than Lautner and Collins, who both lack the ability to carry a movie. Added to its nonsensical plotting and hamhanded dialogue, Abduction ends up as a kid-gloved Bourne that won’t impress anyone over 20.