Two out of Five stars
Running time: 106 minutes

Abduction is a forgettable mishmash of a movie and single-handedly proves Taylor Lautner is not yet ready to carry a film all on his own.

Whats it about?
Nathan Harper (Taylor Lautner) lives with his parents and has been having nightmares about witnessing the murder of a woman. While working with longtime crush Karen (Lily Collins) on a school project Harper finds his photo on a missing persons website and decides to confront his parents about it.

Suddenly his parents are brutally murdered in his own home and with the help of his psychiatrist Dr. Geraldine Bennett (Sigourney Weaver) flees the attackers with Karen. Nathan discovers that his parents were not his biological parents and must uncover the truth of a conspiracy involving the CIA, rogue assassins and his biological parents.

The Good
Taylor Lautner is impressive in that he obviously performs his own stunts, the camera never cuts away so you see every fall, every flip and every fight as a fluid motion making it undeniable that Lautner is a talented physical performer. The action scenes are well shot and exciting, although the stakes never really seem that high. Sigourney Weaver is a treasured presence but not even she can overcome the shoddy script.

The Bad

Despite Lautner’s impressive stunt-work he falls flat when it comes to delivering lines, showing emotion or basic movement. Every shot of him not falling, flipping or fighting is almost unbearably awkward. Abduction has single-handedly proven that Lautner is not capable of holding a movie on his own, and not even the help of veteran actors like Sigourney Weaver could help his case. To be fair it’s not all Lautner’s fault, the script is just terrible and feels like a mix between a dead pan comedy and the melodramatic moaning of the Twilight series (which Lautner is most known for). This film was quite obviously made for Lautner’s Twilight fans to see him in a different light, unfortunately it does the opposite and non-Twilight audiences will slap him with all the worse connotations of the vampire franchise.

Worth Seeing?
Although the movie is supposed to be a thriller the audience I saw it with laughed more than a few times at the dodgy dialogue. Unless you’re a die-hard Taylor Lautner/Twilight fan or you enjoy disappointing, anti-climactic thrillers you wouldn’t be missing out by skipping this one.