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Taken, not stirred

Humanity's long flirtation with alchemy yielded insights into the world around us. Whether one considers it to be a protoscience or a pseudoscience, the one thing that it indisputably established is that transmutation of base metals is not possible. Or, more simply put, you can't turn lead into gold. Of course, as with most scientific inquiries, there will always be doubters who require constant and ongoing experimentation. And so, we have "Abduction".

Young Nathan (Taylor Lautner) lives the life of an average movie teenager, which is to say that he rides down the backroads of Pennsylvania balancing on the hood of a pick-up truck (suburban surfing?), drinks too much at parties (okay - fair enough), and wakes up the next morning shirtless on the front lawn (good news for the 'tween girl audience). He is also an exceptional athlete, dominating the wrestling team and being trained in mixed martial arts by his father (Jason Isaacs, the "Harry Potter" series) who pushes him remorselessly. Dealing with more than his fair share of angst, he makes regular visits to his shrink (Sigourney Weaver, "Avatar") to discuss a recurring dream involving a woman being attacked. In the midst of all of this, while working on a school project with Karen (Lily Collins, "The Blind Side"), his crush of a neighbor, he stumbles across what he believes to be his baby picture on a web site featuring abducted children. From there, the movie devolves from a vaguely interesting story into a completely implausible mess involving stolen documents, the CIA, black-ops, and an international arms syndicate.

The blame for this mess needs to be placed squarely on two things 1) the screenplay, and 2) Taylor Lautner. First, the screenplay is just awful. Written by first-timer Shawn Christensen, it contains extremely lazy plot-points ("This cell phone that I just found has the secret encoded data on it. He must have texted it to himself!") and dialogue so laughably clichéd it's a wonder the actors could deliver it with a straight face ("I can't believe that my whole life was a sham and that I just got chased all over the country." "How are you doing with that?"). The one thing that can be said for the screenplay is that Mr. Lautner deserves no better. Regardless of his physique, he is completely lacking in presence and acting ability. His stunts (assuming that he performed any of them) look good, but anytime the camera gets closer than a long shot, the audience gets pulled right out of the moment. His two expressions, mouth closed and mouth open, somehow don't manage to convey anything other than, "I'm in an action movie. I gotta look hard."

Even director John Singleton's ("Boyz In The Hood" - John, what happened?) efforts to raise this out of the mud by drawing on the unquestioned talent of the likes of Sigourney Weaver, Maria Bello, Alfred Molina, and Michael Nyqvist can't make it any better. In fact, seeing that kind of talent work with this kind of script actually makes it even worse. As for Singleton, it's nice to see that he can still handle the camera and he does keep things chugging along - which is appreciated since the end couldn't come soon enough.

Given the spectacular success of the "Twilight" series, it was of course inevitable that Mr. Lautner be given a shot at an action vehicle like "Abduction", but hopefully the sequel that is virtually promised at the end will never come to be. Then again, given the legions of young women out there desperate for any opportunity to plunk their money down to see Lautner take his shirt off, maybe Hollywood will disprove thousands of years of research and turn this slag into box office gold.