film review: abduction
Directed by John Singleton, Abduction follows a young man named Nathan (Taylor Lautner), who sets out to uncover the truth about his life after finding his baby photo on a missing persons website with the help of his friend and neighbour, Karen (Lilly Collins).
For a movie that has a fair amount of potential, Abduction was a bit of a letdown. The crowd went in expecting a varying range of fight scenes and a complicated plot. What they got instead, was a bit of an anti-climactic film with hardly any substance.
The implication one got from the advertisement was that it was a blockbuster film with a lot of action, but in reality, it was certainly lacking in these areas. When there were fight scenes, they were very good, but there were very few of them. It seemed as though the audience held on thinking that the film would pick up later on, but by the end of it, many seemed relieved to leave the cinema.
Parts of the film were rather funny, and intentionally so, but in others, people were laughing at the incredulity of the dialogue and the unintentional humorous interludes. “You will then be responsible for the death of all your friends … on Facebook” says Kozlo (played by Michael Nyqvist), gaining quite a few hoots of laughter from the audience.
The ridiculousness of some of the scenes in the movie will make you roll your eyes a fair bit. For example, after Nathan and Karen watch the ‘bad guys’ attack his parents, they try to get information out of one of the surviving men, who only replies with “I’m not dying here, there’s a bomb in the oven”. So Nathan and Karen rush over to the kitchen, open the oven, and low and behold, a cartoon-looking bomb is placed in the oven. They only just manage to escape the house before it explodes. The incredulity continues when, during a fight scene on a train, Nathan manages to smash open a train window (which is an inhuman task), to dispose the body of the defeated bad guy.
All in all, Abduction is pretty much just another run down attempt at trying to connect with the younger audience. It has an unreasonable number of unnecessary low-angle shots and a confusing amount of scenes where Lautner has his shirt off.
Singleton has set up the conclusion to suggest the possibility of a sequel, but it makes one suspect that they will probably have to pay the cast a lot of money if they agree to take part in it.
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