Abduction

One might ask why I would watch a Taylor Lautner movie ever? Especially since he starred in and was just as bad as everyone else in the Twilight fiasco. Well here's why:

I will take the time to mention that while he does slide down glass at one point in the movie, immediately prior to that his gun had just been taken away (A revolver no less), and there was no broken glass in the scene.

What the box makes you think could be any typical Spy Thriller is actually just the story of the son of a spy who's life is turned upside-down by a bunch of people blowing up his house and killing his parents.It starts out far too slowly and has far too little action to be called an action movie. Just a bunch of stuff that happens between when you insert the disc and when you take it out and return it to the place you found it.

Everything about this movie tries to be "hard core" and it would have succeeded had it not been mainly a movie about teen angst that tried to mix in a few spy elements. Separate the two and you could have had two different movies. In fact, with the coherency of the plot being so low, and the entire thing seeming a bit mashed together I wouldn't be surprised if they had taken the outline for a spy movie and tacked it onto that of a teen movie.

Had this been about a burned NSA agent, not the estranged son of a spy, had the bad guys not been so easy to spot, had it not misused the cast, and had it been longer it would have been a perfectly good, and entirely different movie than this one, it also would have been what I expected from a movie with one of its taglines being "They stole his life, he's going to take it back"
Aside from the promotion of the movie being misleading, there are also a few plot-holes that need addressing:
1) The CIA can not operate on American soil: This means that the operative of the main agency in the movie should all be arrested by the agencies that can operate on American soil, or at least reprimanded for not following the rules, which is my main problem with the Cody Banks films. Do the idiots who make these movies not know about the NSA or paramilitary? Now, when the setting is outside the US or the agency is a semi-legal prelature of the CIA then I don't complain (See Burn Notice) but this is beyond bending the rules of the real world to the point where in movies like these the CIA is about as generically used as skeletons, black cats and bats are in haunted houses.
2) After sliding down the glass as shown on the DVD cover and one of the posters of the movie, Lautner's character twists his ankle, a few minutes later he's perfectly fine.
3) If this movie was any more over-reaching with its plot I'd say they tried and failed to combine Burn Notice with some bad 1990s teen drama (Specifically, Roswell) and then stuck a few decent actors in it to sell it.

All in all this is the definition of a B movie, bad writing, bad acting, bad concept, and bad marketing, I give it a 2.3*, because it doesn't deserve an even numbered rating.

Photo credits google image search.