The Age of Commercialism

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

My review will be short and sweet: Little Nikita (1988), starring 80's heartthrob River Phoenix, did the whole "kid discovers his parents are spies" thing much better. And River didn't see the need to take his shirt off every 5 minutes to distract you from the fact that he can't act... because he actually could.And for another "teenager gets caught up in spy stuff" movie, check out Gotcha! (1985) with Anthony Edwards from Revenge of the Nerds and ER.The 80's did spy movies much better. I'm pretty sure that's because we had lots of inspiration due to the Cold War.

A change of pace from gritty urban director John Singleton who tries to go for a Hitchcock type thriller with a teen audience in mind. Singleton in the past directed a Fast and Furious sequel so he has a previous in this type of movies. Taylor Lautner is a teenage High school kid who whilst working on an assignment discovers a photo of him as a kid on a missing person's website. He realises that people looking after him are not his real parents and that he is a missing person. When he and his girlfriend, Lily Collins delve into it more, they suddenly find that his supposed parents are attacked and killed by ruthless Russian agents. Lautner and Collins find themselves on the run with few people they can trust.Lautner discovers that the childhood memories which always haunted him were true and that his real mother was attacked and killed. His real father is a high level secret agent that the bad guys want to smoke out as he has access to a list of rogue agents. The couple raising him were also agents who wanted to protect him. Therefore they raised him to fight and have survival skills in case it were needed one day.Veteran actors such as Alfred Molina and Sigourney Weaver drop by as people who might help or hinder the runaway pair.Abduction is an efficient action thriller with a corny script. Lautner does well enough with the action scenes and he seems to be doing a lot of his own stunts. He is let down by his dramatic acting, not helped by being saddled with poor lines. However I have noticed that he seems to come across a lot better in comedy subsequent comedy roles. Collins is there as eye candy only and Singleton handles the action scenes well and keeps the tension going but the movie is never more than average.

With the film titled Abduction we'd at least expect (or hope) Taylor Lautner's high school-er will be abducted. No? Maybe he was abducted before, hence the parents who look nothing like him but have different skin colour too. Nathan (Lautner) also miraculously knows how to defend himself. Convincing? Not in a million years. A lukewarm story accompanied by a enigmatic script awards Lautner zero edge and maximum cheesiness. Lily Collins, although very pretty and adept at acting these days, has little to do but gawp. Their romance is ruined by one foul line and an even fouler kiss. Someone wants Nathan dead, someone connected to his real father. He's wiggled out of hiding with his surrogate parents (Bello and Isaacs) by an unconvincing terrorist (Nyqvist) who wants an important list that's kept on a mobile phone. Cleverness doesn't come in to Abduction's vocabulary. Even Nathan's psychologist Dr. Bennett's (Weaver) balloon-camera cover-up trick in a hospital feels stupid.Check out my other reviews on http://straighttelling.co.uk

Ha, in reading all the reviews, this movie is hated. I actually kind of liked it once I put myself into the mindset of a fourteen year old girl and just went along for the ride. Sure its just a showcase for Taylor Lautner, and sure his acting is pretty terrible but I enjoyed the story of a teen who discovers the parents who raised him aren't his real folks, triggering events that leave him running for his life and pretending he's in a Jason Bourne movie.I thought the action scenes were pretty good (despite the plot holes) No one can say that Taylor isn't at least... athletic. There was also a great back up cast of talent including Sigourney Weaver, Jason Isaacs, Maria Bello and Alfred Molina.I'll admit the romance/kissing scenes were very awkward but I did enjoy how the audience didn't know who to trust either until the very end. Kinda twisty. 5/30/14