Abduction (2011)

Abduction, John Singleton's final directed feature, arrives with the swagger of a Bourne knockoff and the emotional register of a school assembly. Taylor Lautner plays Nathan Harper, an eighteen-year-old with recurring nightmares, a therapist, and a missing persons website that upends his life. The premise is sturdy enough. The execution is a shrug. Contemporary critics were unkind, and the five percent approval rating suggests the unkindness was earned.

On the ledger of social consciousness, the film is nearly blank. It shows no interest in the cultural conversations that would dominate the following decade. The women here are a girlfriend, a psychiatrist, and two mothers, one dead and one murdered in the first act, and the screenplay asks nothing further of them. Race never becomes a subject. Denzel Whitaker and Alfred Molina appear, and the film simply lets them work, which is its own kind of neutrality. No environmental sermon. No class warfare. No body politics. Nathan's nightmares are plot mechanics, not a window into how his mind differs from anyone else's. History goes unrevised because history is never consulted.

The rest is a chase. Trains, hospitals, a baseball stadium in Pittsburgh, a Serbian broker, a list of twenty-five corrupt agents. The film lectures no one, which in this taxonomy counts as a virtue of omission. It is not preachy. It is not much of anything. Singleton, who made Boyz n the Hood, deserved a better swan song than a Lautner vehicle rushed into production between Twilight installments, and the Pennsylvania tax credit appears to have gotten the better end of the arrangement. A picture with no message and no pulse, filed accordingly.