'Abduction' review

I find the biggest downfall to critiquing a movie is… critiquing it, rather than just watching it. The movie starts off at an archetypal party at some teenager’s house. I think it’s funny when movies show a party at some upper middle class house, seeing as my high school days were spent in a small town where houses of that size were nonexistent. However, Abduction was filmed in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Nathan Harper’s (Taylor Lautner) neighborhood was the affluent suburb of Mount Lebanon, where there would have certainly been large houses.

The next morning, Nathan wakes up on the lawn, his shirt conveniently missing. I read a comment on the Abduction IMDb page that said he takes his shirt off at “the slightest excuse.” Honestly, I think it was the only scene where he did. Anyway, his dad, Kevin Harper, catches him and drives him home. Kevin is played by Jason Isaacs – I barely recognized him! The character was a far cry from the long-haired, twistedly slick Lucius Malfoy. At first I did not particularly like Kevin. He seemed like a preachy macho man. To prove his point, Kevin has Nathan get into a kickboxing match with him. I enjoyed watching Nathan kick Kevin’s butt! Lautner got to show off his martial arts skills in this movie – he’s studied since he was 6 years old and has won awards at national and international competitions for kids under age 12. He still had to train in kickboxing, however.

I did appreciate that they attempted to show the awkwardness of being a teenager, and in a humorous way. For instance, he and longtime neighbor Karen Murphy (Lily Collins) like each other, but both are too nervous to say anything. That’s typical, but Nathan’s friend Gilly (Denzel Whitaker) calls him on it and challenges him to actually say something to her. Cocky, Nathan accepts the challenge and as Karen is walking by stumbles out, “Hey…Karen.”

At school, Nathan and Karen are paired together for a report. While studying for the report on missing children they come across a site where a boy named Steven Price, when aged, looks like Nathan. Troubled, Nathan talks about it with Gilly before asking his mom, Mara Harper (Maria Bello) for the truth. He also calls the website, which is actually owned by the bad guys – Russian spies led by freelance agent (everyone’s freelance these days!) Viktor Kozlow (Michael Nyqvist). It’s not long after Mara tells Nathan the truth, that the Russians show up at their house and kill Mara and Kevin – but not before Mara gets a chance to do some butt-kicking herself. Karen had come back over and gets injured, so Nathan takes her to the hospital. While Karen is being tended to, Nathan calls the police, but gets CIA agent Frank Burton (Alfred Molina) instead. Frank tells him what’s going on and asks Nathan – who is indeed Steven Price – to wait for him there, assuming that Steven will trust him and cooperate.

However, Steven is a teenager who just had his life turned upside down, and grabs Karen and runs. And they keep running, from the CIA and the Russian spies. It’s over the hills and through the woods they go, on a train, to his biological father, Paul Rasen’s house, and ending up at Pirate’s stadium (PNC Park).

The movie was okay. I read a lot of bad reviews about it, but I feel they were unjustified. True, it’s not going to win any awards. But it provided decent entertainment on a dreary afternoon. It’s a movie that you see at the $2 theater (if you have them in your area). Even though the actors were talented (yes, I am including Lautner – don’t hate him cuz he’s young), the acting was a little cheesy and awkward. Adding to that is the PG-13 F-bomb. It always seems out of place. Either don’t have it all or have it in there at least a few times. And in this movie it totally didn’t fit in the scene – it came out really awkward.

However, there were several aspects of the film that I appreciated, like I mentioned earlier about the teenage awkwardness. Karen may not have had much personality in my opinion, but she was always fully clothed and had brains – enough to manipulate a caretaker at the cemetery. In that moment she reminded me of Lindsay Lohan, and I mean that in a good way.

They also had a knack for stating the obvious that gets left out. Often in these movies they’re constantly running and it spans several hours, even days, but they don’t often eat. At one point Frank catches up to Steven and Karen. Once Frank gets them to go with him, he notes that they probably haven’t eaten in about 22 hours, they must be hungry, and takes them to a restaurant where they eat like ravenous wolves.

Toward the end, Frank is talking to Steven about his father Paul, a CIA agent. He makes the point that Paul is not that different from the Russian spies – “They’re two sides of the same coin,” says Frank. Then you see some of the Russian spies being shot by Paul from afar. In these action flicks the “good” guys are killing the bad guys, which is exactly what the bad guys were doing. What makes them any better? Interesting to think about.