Abduction (2011) Review

This film was an example of mediocrity at its best. Action movies are amongst the easiest to dial in. All you need is a couple bad guys with accents and a protagonist for them to chase. Throw in a viable excuse for their pursuit and you have yourself an action flick. To make it more than decent, you have to have a good plot with some exciting twists. This film made an attempt, but failed on that front in my opinion. This felt to me more like a movie of the week action flick.

Abduction (2011) was written by Shawn Christensen and directed by John Singleton. It stars Taylor Lautner, Lily Collins, Alfred Molina, Jason Isaacs, Maria Bello and Sigourney Weaver. High-school-senior Taylor (Lautner) is popular at school and is on the wrestling team, but he has always felt like he didn’t belong and is plagued by a recurring nightmare of a woman dying. While researching a high school project, he stumbles upon a missing child report which he believes to be his photo as a child. He starts to dig deeper and unravels a mystery and discovers that his whole life has been a lie and his parents are not his parents.

This was a mildly entertaining film. The acting from Lautner is small screen worthy at best in my opinion. The plot was simple and at times very predictable. I feel like you have to put more edge in an action movie to make it really stand out and this one didn’t deliver. The best thing this movie really had going for it was Sigourney Weaver. Apparently she had trained black ops operatives, at least that was her backstory, and she only got maybe ten minutes of screen time. That was a shame. I see a lot of wasted potential in this film.
Overall there are too many good action movies out there and this isn’t one of them. As far as action movies go I usually look for a big name as the star, like Willis or Schwartzenegger. Not the kid who played a werewolf in Twilight. Skip this one and go check out John Wick.

• The budget for this film was 35 million dollars and the worldwide gross is 82 million dollars.
• This film was released on September 23, 2011 and was produced and distributed by Lionsgate.
• This film was shot in Pennsylvania.
• Shawn Christiensen said that the story for the film was taken from a single idea of a teenager who sees a photo of himself on a missing persons website. He completed the first draft in two months.
• The screenplay for this film was featured in the 2010 Blacklist; a list of the "most liked" unmade scripts of the year.
• This is director John Singleton's second PG-13 movie. The first was 2 Fast 2 Furious.
• The film was fast-tracked into production to accommodate Taylor Lautner's schedule for The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 and 2, which were shot back-to-back.
• One of the producers, Dan Lautner, is Taylor Lautner's father.
• Taylor Lautner did the vast majority of his own stunts.
• This film is considered to be a remake of Little Nikita.
• This was the final film that John Singleton directed before his death on April 29, 2019 at the age of 51.