Twilight star has a lot more to prove if he's to have any kind of career. Elizabeth Kerr reports.

What's an actor to do when his or her entire career is defined by one property? Jet Li famously stated several years ago that he was done with martial arts but he has donned the robes of a Master on more than a few occasions since. If an actor is lucky, he can either parlay his signature role/persona into a kind of pop culture chic - think Leonard Nimoy - or simply use sheer force of will and stupendous box office success to break out of the mold: Harrison Ford has transcended Han Solo and Indiana Jones.

The kids - and they are kids - from the Harry Potter and Twilight series are now staring down the barrel of that same gun. Harry Potter wrapped up this past summer with much fanfare, and the core trio are steeling themselves to see if they'll be taken seriously outside of Hogwarts. Star Daniel Radcliffe headlines The Woman in Black next February, as a lawyer in a vaguely supernatural drama. Will audiences buy the Boy Who Lived as something other than a wizard? Emma Watson is taking the indie route with a supporting role in My Week with Marilyn, and Rupert Grint stars as a World War II pilot in Comrade. My money's on Watson's dabble in low-key "real filmmaking" carrying the day.

Twilight is afflicted with a zealous fanaticism - on both sides of the divide - that makes it even harder for its trinity of let's call them performers to avoid the pitfalls of being so intensely associated with one role. The fear is that Twihards will only accept Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart, and Taylor Lautner as a sparkly vampire, insipid girlfriend, and usually naked werewolf. Haters have felt gleefully vindicated by Pattinson and Stewart, to date, simply doing Twilight-light elsewhere - poorly. Outside the franchise (concluding next year), Stewart has gnawed her lip through roles as Joan Jett (The Runaways) and a bored '80s amusement park staffer (Adventureland). Pattinson was forgettable in the misguided 9/11 romance Remember Me and the schmaltzy Water For Elephants, wherein he got his Edward Cullen brood on. And 2012 will feature Stewart as a warrior version of Snow White (Snow White and the Huntsman). Uh oh.

Which leaves it to young Taylor Lautner to prove there is life after young adult movie adaptations. In Abduction, Lautner plays Nathan, a high school kid with anger issues (who knows why), unconventional parents he seems to dislike, and squeal-inducing washboard abs - which make an appearance at 4:34:09. While working on a school project with his neighbor Karen (Phil's daughter Lily Collins, agonizing), the surly Nathan discovers himself on a missing kids' website. After innumerable plot conveniences later (would you keep the clothing you kidnapped a child in for 16 years?) he tips off the bad guys to his whereabouts and the kid-on-the-run adventure begins. Who are mom and dad? Why is Nathan suddenly important to enigmatic CIA agent Frank Burton (Alfred Molina) and generic Eastern European terrorist type Kozlow (Dragon Tattoo's Michael Nyqvist)? Does Lautner have more than 4 expressions? Do dire financial straits explain Sigourney Weaver's presence here?

As much of an outright mess as Abduction is - for the record, no one is ever abducted by anything or anyone - director John Singleton (Four Brothers, Boyz n the Hood) and "writer" Shawn Christensen have crafted the years' finest comedy so far. It's ostensibly a paranoid thriller in the Enemy of the State vein with a chaser of teen international espionage pawn Hanna, that's convinced it's saying something Deep And Meaningful (don't ask me what though). This movie is bad. But it's never less than completely entertaining. The dialogue is ripe with the kind of howlers common in '80s Hong Kong action cinema when subtitlers did the job in about 20 minutes. Making matters even more riotous is the deadpan seriousness with which everyone delivers the wealth of instantly quotable nuggets. One of the best exchanges comes during a train-board makeout session, when Karen exclaims "Wow, that was better than in middle school," to which Nathan replies, "I know what I'm doing now."

And that's Abduction's biggest problem: Lautner clearly doesn't know what he's doing. More than any other in the Twilight-verse, Lautner is a fluke: a cute boy with barely a sliver of talent, who without fangirls shaming Summit Entertainment into re-hiring after Twilight would have no job. His performance is full of amateur, fussy gesticulating, perhaps an attempt to draw attention away from the fact he's looking for his marks on the floor, toothy obnoxiousness and his stable of expressions: squint, super-squint, sneer, and smirk. To be fair, Abduction's increasingly bone-headed narrative gives him little to work with, but at this stage Lautner exhibits zero leading man qualities.

A weak performance in itself isn't always the kiss of death (Keanu Reeves is still working), but it is when Lautner and his "people" are out to prove he's the real deal, and proceed to build a product around him. Abduction has a franchise tone, something along the lines of the Jason Bourne films (evidenced by not-so-subtle "Nathan looks like Matt Damon" jokes) and its cynical creativity by demographic stamp is all over it. Abercrombie & Fitch-ready models/actors? Check. Respectable supporting cast on hand to prop up painfully weak leads? Check. Director with dwindling street cred willing to tow the studio line? Check.

But those value-added features can't help generally sloppy, albeit uproarious, filmmaking. How hard is it to remember to limp when you've "broken an ankle"? Pretty hard evidently, as Lautner puts his full weight on said ankle only to recall it's "broken" a few seconds later. And did you know you can take Amtrak (in a train car bigger than most Hong Kong flats) from Pittsburg to Omaha and stop in Ohio nowhere near its tracks? Newsflash. You have to go through Chicago - in the other direction. And considering the information everyone's after has been texted somewhere, doesn't that mean there's a copy on a server any self-respecting Easter European terrorist could hack, saving a trip and the trouble of fake fingertips? Come on, people! Not even Pattinson would agree to this level of nonsense.

Abduction opened in Hong Kong on Thursday.

(HK Edition 10/01/2011 page4)