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Released on September 23rd, this action-thriller starring up-and-comer Taylor Lautner begins
with an intriguing premise of adoption, and secret witness protection families... before
quickly dissolving into a brain-dead action flick. While browsing through a missing-persons
website, Lautner sees his own photo, and begins to question everything in his life. But honestly,
he probably would have been better off ignoring it, as the movie goes downhill after a decently
solid first-act. Alfred Molina, Mario Bello, Sigourney Weaver and Lily Collins all hang
around and attempt to help Lautner with his identity-crisis / problem with terrorists...
but honestly, none of them bring anything memorable or particularly interesting to the proceedings. -CLIP- On the most basic
levels of guy-friendly cinema, this movie holds your attention, and is mostly enjoyable
-- but just barely. The filmmaking itself is sloppy and fast, the dialog and one-liners
are often cringe-worthy, and the fights themselves seem uninspired and borrowed from much better
movies. You throw in a hokey teen romance sub-plot between the two *** leads, and
a trendy pop-soundtrack, and you've got yourself a recipe for a very mediocre, but undeniably
entertaining film. Make to mistake: "Abduction" isn't very good... but if you're in the mood
for gunfire, car chases and Taylor Lautner shouting every fifth line in anger... you've
come to the right place. When the final plot-point settles into place, you'd be hard pressed
to find someone who still cares about the outcome... the ending is predictable and stale,
but at 106-minutes, at least it gets there without wasting too much of your time. Although
this motion picture grossed 82-million dollars on a 35-million-dollar budget, it seems evident
that Lautner isn't quite ready for primetime. If he was looking for his own movie to help
shake the stigma of the Twilight quadrilogy... I'm afraid he'll have to keep looking. "Abduction",
a "Watchable, fast-moving haphazard mess." Well, those are my thoughts on this film,
so now let's take a look at what you had to say in the YouTube comments.
Here's the Rate-o-matic to rank our scores for "Abduction"... a FOUR and a THREE. Your
scores were all over the place, with some folks really enjoying the action, while others
simply hated acting and dialog. You thought this was a "Bad" movie. Mostly agreeing with
you, I felt this movie actually delivered in the enjoyment department, but ultimately
it wasn't very well made, or acted - I thought it was "Meh".