Abduction
After seeing Abduction, I can only really think of three possibilities to explain what happened: 1.) John Singleton has completely lost it. 2.) John Singleton is a comic genius. 3.) John Singleton outsourced the directing of this movie to an 8th grader. Actually, the scenario I choose to believe is going to greatly effect the final grade here. If this really was a sincere effort on John Singleton's part, then the film is horrible. If it really was meant to be a comedic spoof then it was passable... though I'd have to rewatch it in that frame of mind to be certain (not something I'd look forward to). If he outsourced the direction of the movie to an 8th grader... well, then... not bad!
The real problem here is that the movie sucks. Terribly. The acting? Shit. The story? Same old yawn-inducing, vaguely bad-smelling, but mostly inconvenient shit. The tone or feel of the movie? Amateurish shit. The plot involves some kind of half-baked CIA/spy vs. spy story. Terms like rogue asset, Level 4 (or some bs) clearance, and things of the like are bandied about. A bad dude with a vaguely eastern European accent comes to America to hunt down the good (but maybe bad?... eh, who cares) dude for some spy-ish reason. Taylor Lautner plays the kid stuck in the middle, trained by his CIA agent parents for the (in terms of the film, but never in real life or any close approximation therein) inevitable day when he'd have to stand on his own. Ass-kickery- which was about the only thing the film had going for it... that is, if you're in to that sort of thing- ensues. The end. I'm sure there are probably more details that went into the plot, but I just don't remember what they were or why I should care.
Actually, for the better part of the movie, I was struggling to figure out if John Singleton was serious here. The movie was so awful and so amateurish. And Singleton? Wasn't he the edgy bad boy sort of director who helmed such badass flicks as Boyz N the Hood, Higher Learning, and... umm.. Shaft? According to imdb.com, this is indeed the same Singleton. Hmmm. Ok, so I've never seen those movies...maybe they suck too and this guy is just floating by on his undeserved reputation. Or... maybe... imdb is wrong and this is a different Singleton. Or maybe he just took a shit on cellophane and sold it to the studio. Whatever. It's unimportant. The movie sucked in any event. But, seriously, I kept wondering if this was just some kind of spoof. It really kind of resembled one of those comically epic (well... that's their intention) cellphone commercials full of melodramatic overacting, overly dramatized shots, and complete with a ridiculously dramatic score. Even those tend to fall flat- successful spoofing does require some degree of wit, you can't just blow all the cliches up to an enormous size in hopes that the sheer spectacle will win some laughs. Here, everything is so ridiculously melodramatic, the acting so bad (how bad was it? It sounded like Sigourney Weaver was reading a cue card... for the first time when they shot her scenes. Lautner just squints a lot and sounds like an over eager high school actor... and things actually go down from there. Everyone was pretty well emotionless... except, I suppose Maria Bello... she was the only one who was dedicated/naive enough to bring her B game), the shots so forced it just felt like at the end they were going to peddle the latest HTC smartphone. (Come to think of it, a cellphone is a major player in the movie... hmmm). By the end of the film I had to start laughing just to keep from getting my eyes stuck at the back of my head (from all the eye rolling I was doing... no, it isn't witty if you have to explain it... maybe Singleton will let me direct his next movie... bam.)
So yeah, it sucked. Well unless it was a spoof. Then it was ok. I kind of wonder why Singleton didn't at least try to peddle that off as an explanation. Well, maybe he didn't want to embarrass his 8th grader buddy. Because... Singleton couldn't really put together something this bad...could he? Hmmm... I suppose he just did (until he tells us otherwise)...
Grade: D-
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