Directrospective: ABDUCTION (2011)
Notes on the films of American director John Singleton.
To be fair, Taylor Lautner is quite good at the kicking part of acting.
Today our John Singleton Directrospective series ends with ABDUCTION, and it’s ending much like our Danny Boyle Directrospective did with YESTERDAY. Each is by far the most anonymously directed entry in the filmmakers’ respective canons, working from an off-the-rack script that engages few to none of the ideas to which Singleton and Boyle almost always return. YESTERDAY was an underwritten rom-com ostensibly about a world where the Beatles don’t exist, only it’s really about a plagiarist’s guilt. ABDUCTION is about what if the third lead from the TWILIGHT movies was a teenage Jason Bourne? Sounds like that could be pretty cool, maybe?
It isn’t.
Where YESTERDAY inspired a whole lot of Why Didn’t You Think Of This foofaraw on my part, ABDUCTION inspires very little of anything. And while the opportunities wasted by YESTERDAY really got my goat, I take solace in the fact that Danny Boyle is still working and might well do something pretty good again. John Singleton doesn’t have any more chances to make a real John Singleton movie, and knowing that makes this flavorless slog all the more disappointing.
Making a spy movie seems like a lot of fun for everyone involved. You get to film gunplay and driving stunts and hand-to-hand combat and there are gadgets and explosions and everybody’s hamming it up while double-crossing everybody else. If somebody from Lionsgate called me right now and asked if I’d like to make a $35 million teen spy caper with two of Hollywood’s latest good-looking uncharismatic 19-year-olds, of course I’d say yes. Give me whatever nubile dead-eyed mannequins you’re pushing this week and a half dozen black SUVs, that sounds great. It would be a blast, and I wouldn’t intend for it to be the last film I ever direct in my life. Singleton didn’t either, and I hope he had a good time making it.
I did not have a good time watching it. I don’t care about Taylor Lautner’s teen daredevil Nathan Harper, I don’t care about his neighbor and crush Karen Murphy (Lily Collins), I don’t care how he feels about the people he thought were his parents (Maria Bello and Jason Isaacs, whose paychecks I hope were lovely) revealing that they’re actually just bodyguards and his real spy dad had to abandon him for his own protection. I don’t care about the shit he has to do to clear his dad’s name even though he just learned he exists and is mad at him. I don’t care about whether he should trust CIA middle-manager Alfred Molina or small town psychologist/spy handler Sigourney Weaver. It’s all very familiar stuff that’s been done much better elsewhere. Most contemporary reviews ripped into Taylor Lautner’s acting in way that feels cruel and unwarranted to me, so I won’t do that. When his abs got him cast in TWILIGHT at 16, the project was just some fluff for preteen girls that nobody thought was going to be as huge as it was. If they’d known, they would have put real actors in it. Kid was an accomplished martial artist, girls thought he was cute, why not give him a shot as an action star? It didn’t work out, but it’s not like he wrote himself the part or insisted on final cut. Lionsgate wanted him to happen and they picked a bum vehicle. Even with a powerfully magnetic lead, the script would still be a clunker.
Like SHAFT and FOUR BROTHERS, this film uses violence the way plenty of action films do, as a cool and exciting and cathartic means to show good triumphing over evil. Also like those films, this one is by from the director of BOYZ N THE HOOD, and as I said in my post on FOUR BROTHERS, seeing John Singleton’s name in the credits only reminds me of how perfectly his very first film demonstrated that violence only begets more violence. It’s hard to enjoy a cartoonish shoot-em-up popcorn movie that follows that name, and hard to root for Lautner to pull out his dad’s revolver and blow the Serbian terrorist’s head off when Singleton already taught us in BOYZ to root for Tre Styles to let his dad take the gun out of his hands, or in BABY BOY for Jody to let his mother’s boyfriend Melvin do the same, before even more lives are lost to the cycle of carnage all around them. You can’t put that cat back in the bag.
There isn’t much else here. Fun house explosion, I guess. Nice to see Molina chewing up the scenery. That’s it.
I’m beyond glad that I decided to watch through Singleton’s filmography in these last few weeks. Both his powerful early work and the later blockbusters have pushed me to confront my own ideas about representation, my relationship to movie violence, and my own personal responsibilities. Films like HIGHER LEARNING and BABY BOY are complex, challenging texts that I’m very grateful to have had the excuse to really sit with and digest. I got to see some career-high performances from Laurence Fishburne, Ice Cube, Janet Jackson, Tupac Shakur, Tyrese Gibson, Adrienne-Joi Johnson, and Ving Rhames, and there wasn’t nearly as much Michael Rapaport as there could have been. I more than understand now why his unexpected death inspired the enormous response it did. His was an irreplaceable and badly needed voice in American cinema. We could use some more John Singleton films right now.
Next week, I’ll start on a new series looking at the films of Australian whackjob Alex Proyas, if only because writing about his first six films will make a deep dive on GODS OF EGYPT in August 2020 seem a little bit less insane. I’m really excited.