That Damn Taylor Lautner Movie

By Fearless Young Orphan Abduction (2011)

Directed by John Singleton

Abduction has a 4% rating at rottentomatoes.com.

Awright, let’s talk about backlash. It seems people are pretty unforgiving of Taylor Lautner, a young man who has made a name for himself by being Jacob the werewolf and causing much hormonal upheaval in the bodies of young people. I have yet to see any of the Twilight movies, but I sure as hell have seen this guy’s face and torso all over creation. I’m sick to death of him too. Or maybe I’m just sick of the idea of him. The Rotten Tomatoes average for Abduction is 4%, which is pretty shockingly low, and if I am to believe my eyes, most of the lousy reaction stems from people being pretty tired of seeing this guy around. I get this. I came to Abduction with a groan, saying, “Oh gawd I guess I’d better watch that damn Taylor Lautner movie,” like the film doesn’t even have a real name, it’s just “that damn Taylor Lautner movie.”

Well, you definitely do get that impression by watching it. The script is a standard wrong- man styled thriller in which a young man finds himself on the run from mysterious assassins, his life not what he thought it was. These films are all about the “guy,” and very little else. The reason he is wanted is always a Macguffin, the things he must do to survive are always above and beyond logic, and he will invariably be paired off with an attractive woman because sex is part of the deal, and he will have to run and run and fight and chase and run and hide and run and chase and fight and run. So then you plunk Taylor Lautner down in there and make sure that he gets to be the gooey delicious eye-candy for the whole thing, and he is on screen 95% of the time, and everything depends on whether we can bear to follow him around for the two hours that he is doing all that exciting stuff.

Though I may have referred to Taylor as “gooey delicious eye-candy,” please do not mistake that for admiration – I reiterate, these pumped-up pretty boys are not my type. Girl’s gotta have something freaky, ya know? But he has been designated by the movie industry as gooey delicious eye-candy, and I believe it is printed on his Screen Actors’ Guild card. He is the main draw for this film, meant to pull in the audiences of horny people who love to look at him. He is put in situation after situation that requires him to do martial arts and other badass shit in tight shirts and tight jeans. (Is it just me, or does he walk as if his muscles are too bunched up to function correctly? He walks as if he needs a muscle relaxer.)

Anyway, he is also given numerous opportunities to look pensive and brooding because bad stuff has happened to him, and this is my favorite part because Lautner’s acting style causes him to constantly look as if he is about to sneeze. Eyes nearly closed, nose poised and ready to explode, that look of dread and anticipation hovering on his forehead. Oh doe, I’b going to sdeeze! Add I don’d hab addy tissues! I actually blame the more hilarious aspects of his performance on the rather lazy script, which has a gaping hole where any original or interesting dialog was supposed to go. Hey, he’s delivering the lines he was given. That’s not his fault.

Lautner portrays high school senior Nathan, who lives a pretty sweet life with his awesome gorgeous parents (Jason Isaacs and Maria Bello!) in a gorgeous home in a beautiful suburb. He gets in trouble like an ordinary teenage boy will, you know, drinking when he shouldn’t and staying out all night. Oh and by the way, shame on this movie for showing him riding on the hood of a pickup truck down a country highway for fun, when they know that kids are idiots and will try the same damn thing themselves and get killed doing it. What else? Oh, he sees a therapist (Sigourney Weaver!) who tells him to start repressing his memories pronto (weird, huh?) and he’s secretly in love with the girl next door Karen (Lily Collins) who is very pretty and will never out-act him, so no problems there.

Then BAM! Nathan discovers his baby pictures on one of those missing- children websites. What the hell? He tries to find out if this “abducted” child was really him and all these clues pop up that indicate he might have had another life before this one, maybe a mother who was killed, and then BAM! before he can get any straight answers, his awesome (foster?) parents are murdered by thugs BAM! and his house is blown up and BAM! Nathan is ON THE RUN! With KAREN! Do you care about the details of this plot? I feel a little weary trying to list them. Nathan figures out pretty quickly that he is being pursued by the CIA (led by Alfred Molina!) and the Russian Mafia (led by Michael Nyqvist!) and his long-lost, biological father (actor uncredited but you’ll recognize the voice!) who was a super secret agent. Then he runs and runs with his Macguffin (list of names!) until it’s time for the finale, and then no more running, but a confrontation MANO Y MANO, that’s right, bitches! Karen stays nearby the whole time looking pretty and worried, but you know, loyal.

This progression of events is predictable in the extreme, but not badly executed for what it is. I mean, at least the action was comprehensible, and I thought the hand-to-hand combat looked pretty good. Everybody in all of these important organizations turns their full attention to being exactly where they need to be to give Taylor Lautner full opportunity to be showcased. I think half the CIA, sections leaders included, showed up at the grand finale in Pittsburgh. But all this international hoopla is not half as important as this: will Nathan and Karen finally decide to go on a date? And why has it taken them so long to justify their love? And can you leave most of the CIA waiting in cars while you mack on your girlfriend? And how likely is it that one of Nathan’s friends is able to construct fake I.D.s at a moment’s notice? My dears, BAM! that is a skill that all best friends should have.

Since I am not a Taylor Lautner fan, and since Abduction is all about letting us look lovingly at Taylor Lautner for two hours, I was at a loss for much to do. I am not the target audience for this film. It is rather a shame that, having decided they were going to make this nothing more than a Lautner-fest, the creators of the film stopped even trying to make it interesting in any other capacity. There are some very impressive names in the supporting cast. All those actors I listed above, with telling exclamation points behind their names, are people I admire tremendously. At the end of this I wanted to text Sigourney Weaver and tell her not to worry too much about it; we can all understand picking up an easy paycheck. What a shame that every supporting character seems to be a more interesting person than “our hero.” For example, what about this couple (Isaacs and Bello) who knowingly took on raising this child, making him their own while always knowing that someday everything could be blown up with a stove bomb?

Better yet, what about this villain (Nyqvist) who is so bad at his chosen career? That’s a man I’d like to learn more about. He is plenty wicked- BAM! seeming, fer sure, but wow, what a terrible criminal he is. His ineptitude makes me wonder about his back-story and how someone who is such a moron could have ever assembled a team of thugs like he did. Dude had a “list of names,” which sounds fairly meaningless to me, and I guess never made a copy. Though the list is in an electronic format, this movie operates as if electronics don’t really exist, and our villain treats his elusive list as if it is written in ink on parchment, and as if his entire “secret operation” hasn’t been blown to crap the minute somebody decided to email the damn thing. Join me in merry, disbelieving laughter while you try to figure out how the hell he thinks involving Nathan in this mess is going to help at all. “Because he’s Taylor Lautner, that’s why!” A list of names, indeed. Good thing we’ve got a gooey delicious eye candy man to distract us from this confusing bit of nonsense.

Are there five things to like about Abduction? It’s going to be hard, because I’ve made myself a rule that the supporting cast, as good as it may be, has to count as just one thing unless someone really gives a standout performance. But let’s give it a try. I think I’ve already got a head start.

1. Supporting cast. There is it. I imagine this movie with all these people, and without Taylor Lautner, and I come up with something kind of cool. But as I pretended to have said to imaginary Sigourney Weaver, “We can all understand picking up an easy paycheck.”

2. Comprehensible action and combat, without too much quick-cut editing. There was a very nice fight scene aboard a train, reminiscent of many instances of classic thriller cinema, and I’m not even being sarcastic.

3. There is a discussion about popcorn. Man, who the hell doesn’t like popcorn?

4. There is baseball. Man, who the hell doesn’t enjoy a baseball game? 5. I liked hearing about the stupid Macguffin plot! The “list of names” is a great Macguffin, used time and again, like in Alfred Hitchcock movies and in Schindler’s List.

Lame, lame, lame. It’s like I’m not even trying. But 4% is too low—you have to give a film just a bit more credit than that, when it has a beginning, middle and end—so I’m going to up my personal percentage rating to 44%. That’s what it gets for being idiotically amusing and for having some people I really love populating the background. One of these days, Taylor Lautner might be in something that makes me forget that he’s Taylor Lautner; maybe he just needs to outgrow his boy-face and stop trying to sneeze. It took me ten years to get over being sick of Leonardo DiCaprio after Titanic, so Taylor and I could possibly reconcile in the year 2022.