Abduction
“One photograph changes everything he thought he knew.”
Director
John Singleton
Release
30 September 2011
Runtime
106 Minutes
Certificate
12A
Synopsis
Nathan Harper has grown up feeling strangely disconnected from the life around him. He cannot explain it, but something has always seemed wrong. Then an ordinary school assignment leads Nathan and his neighbour Karen to a missing-persons website. There he discovers a photograph that appears to show Nathan himself as a young child. The revelation shatters everything he believed about his family. Before Nathan can fully understand what he's uncovered, his home becomes the centre of a violent confrontation and he is forced to flee. With Karen accompanying him, Nathan becomes caught between dangerous pursuers and intelligence operatives whose motives he cannot completely understand. Every answer creates another question. Who are Nathan's real parents? Why was his identity hidden? And why are people willing to kill to get to him? What begins as a teenager searching for his past quickly becomes a race to survive long enough to uncover it. That premise and principal character setup are consistent with the film's published synopsis.
The Movie Trailer
Abduction is a 2011 action thriller starring Taylor Lautner as Nathan Harper, a teenager whose search for answers about his identity throws him into a dangerous conspiracy.
Nathan has always felt that something about his life doesn't quite add up. That suspicion becomes terrifyingly real when he discovers a childhood photograph of himself on a missing-persons website.
Suddenly the people he believed were his parents may not be who they claimed to be, and the questions Nathan has spent years asking become far more dangerous than he ever imagined. With his neighbour Karen at his side, Nathan is forced on the run as he attempts to discover who he really is and why powerful people are determined to find him.
A LIFE BUILT ON A LIE
Nathan Harper Discovers He Isn't Who He Thought He Was
The central hook of Abduction is remarkably simple: what would happen if you discovered your own childhood photograph on a missing-persons website?
For Nathan Harper, the answer destroys the foundations of his life.
The parents who raised him have been hiding something; his identity is suddenly uncertain, and people Nathan has never met seem to know considerably more about him than he knows about himself.
Rather than giving him time to understand the discovery, the film immediately turns Nathan's search for the truth into a fight for survival.
ON THE RUN
Taylor Lautner Steps Into Action-Hero Territory
After his rise to international fame with The Twilight Saga, Abduction gave Taylor Lautner the chance to lead a contemporary action thriller.
Nathan spends much of the film moving from one dangerous situation to another as he gradually uncovers the secrets surrounding his identity.
Lily Collins' Karen becomes his closest ally, while established performers including Sigourney Weaver, Alfred Molina, Jason Isaacs, Maria Bello and Michael Nyqvist fill the conspiracy surrounding him.
For director John Singleton, the result was a different kind of action vehicle built around a young protagonist suddenly thrown into a world he barely understands.
TRUST NO ONE
A Conspiracy That Keeps Nathan Guessing
Nathan's greatest problem isn't simply that dangerous people are chasing him. It's that he doesn't know who deserves his trust.
Information is deliberately withheld from him, identities aren't always what they seem, and Nathan must piece together his own history while staying one step ahead of those pursuing him.
That uncertainty gives Abduction its thriller framework.
Underneath the chases and confrontations is a story about a young man trying to discover the truth about himself after realising that much of the life he remembers was constructed around a secret.