by Mr. Movie Dude | ARCHIVES

I really enjoyed the thrill ride of the motion picture javelin excitement of Taylor Lautner starring as a young man unwittingly thrust into a deadly world of covert espionage in Lionsgate’s action-thriller,  Abduction (directed by John Singleton.) For as long as he can remember, Nathan Harper (Taylor Lautner) has had the uneasy feeling that he’s living someone else’s life. His parents are not his own and his life is a lie, carefully fabricated to hide something more mysterious. Nathan has spent his teenage years in suburban fantasyland outside Pittsburgh.

He’s on the wrestling team, he seems popular enough, his parents Mara (Maria Bello) and Kevin (Jason Isaacs) are loving but stern when he stays out all night partying and he has his own motorcycle. If he struggles with periods of anger issues driven by haunting memories of an unidentifiable woman being murdered in front of him. He sees his shrink, Dr. Bennett (Sigourney Weaver) to work through his demons. Instead of playing catch, his father insists on violently sparring with him in the backyard, but any oddness to that hasn’t occurred to him, until when researching a class project he and Karen come across a Web site with digitally aged photos of children reported missing, one of which looks a lot like Nathan. I won’t give away the secret of Nathan’s background, but let’s allow that it raises dozens of questions that are left unanswered in the scarcely sensual universe Abducted occupies. His poking around online summons the unwelcome attention of various agencies who’ve been keeping an eye out for him, and ominous Eastern Europeans, led by a man named Kozlow (Michael Nyqvist, of the Swedish adaptation of the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series), show up at his doorstep to retrieve him for fiendish purposes.

Of all the action set pieces the film contains, including one that takes place on a train as part of a plotline abandoned immediately afterward and a climax set during a Pirates baseball game for no reason other than the opportunities for chaos it offers, for me there’s none better than the I early one in which Mara and Kevin defend the boy they raised, their tastefully appointed house getting leveled in the process. Maria Bello slashing at a tough guy with garden shears suggests a more complex version of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, a badass-agents-turned-homemakers back story left only hinted at. The production budget for Abduction tipped the scales at $35,000,000. The box office numbers have primarily been driven by foreign box office gross of $54,000, 000 and modest domestic gross of $29,000,000. The overall box office gross landed respectively at $84,000,000 to date.

ABDUCTION GALLERY