Abduction
Time Out New York Project: Issue #830, September 29-October 5, 2011
★☆☆☆☆
Dir. John Singleton. 2011. PG-13. 106mins. Taylor Lautner, Lily Collins, Alfred Molina.
Is there even an abduction in Abduction? Don’t look to the moronic Taylor Lautner vehicle for an answer. It’s too busy racing through plot points and riding roughshod through genres (teen soap opera, fish-out-of-water espionage thriller, PG-13 porno) to bother with anything that makes literal or figurative sense. But what does that matter? All you Team Jacobers out there are gonna get plenty of Lautner lusciousness.
His Shirtlessness plays Nathan, a seemingly normal teenager who finds a photo of himself on a missing-persons website while researching a school project with his hey-hey-you-you-she-could-be-my-girlfriend Karen (Collins). Little does he realize it’s a ruse by a group of evil foreigners to smoke him out so they can kill his undercover-operative parents (Maria Bello and Jason Isaacs) and steal an encoded list with…uh…something really important on it! Yeah!
Pursued by a determined CIA agent (Molina, probably on lunch break from Law & Order: LA) and assisted by his psychotherapist-cum-handler (Sigourney Weaver, oozing what-the-fuck-am-I-doing-here derisiveness), Nathan fights desperately to survive. That means he runs through some foresty locations, does some hot-’n’-heavy saliva-swapping with Karen — theaters should have doctors on call for all the fainting spells — and gets involved in a tension-free climactic scuffle at PNC Park (Pirates!). Twi-Hards shall attend en masse. Adults shall roll their eyes. And on our human comedy shall go.—Keith Uhlich
