"Abduction" Review

The werewolf kid from the Twilight abominations dumps the sparkly vampires and dippy love interest to step into the tweener-action hero spotlight with Abduction, a occasionally fast-moving but inherently banal actioner with an improbable plot, even by the standards of the genre.

Taylor Lautner is a knucklehead jock dumbass who parties hard and doesn't have a care in the world. I mean, other than the father (Jason Issacs) who picks his hungover ass off the lawn of the crime and then makes him fight like a twisted scene from The Great Santini. However, he's not an abusive pop, just someone who's training Shark Boy for the rest of the plot. When Taylor finds a photo on a missing children website that looks like him, his attempt to find out about his past leads to his present being literally blown to pieces and the couple who raised him being killed by bad guys. With the CIA and Russian baddies chasing him and not knowing whom to trust, he takes off with the cute classmate from across the street (Lily "My daddy drums for Genesis" Collins) and the hijnks ensue.

Since the target audience is horny teenage girls, it's understandable how much superfluous rigmarole has to take place up front, in the middle, and at the end. While the action staged by director John Singleton (in his first feature since 2005's lackluster Four Brothers) is occasionally exciting and Lautner is a credible butt-kicker, the pace is too languid for such a threadbare plot. How do the bad guys manage to tap into the CIA's comms without fail? What exactly is the McGuffin they're chasing and why are we supposed to be surprised someone doesn't turn out as they initially appear? Can Taylor act or us he just a square-headed caterpillar with some charm to go with that prison-ripped bod? I'm the wrong audience for this movie, aren't I?

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.