abduction movie reviews

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Common sense media reviewers.

Underwhelming action thriller has deaths, violence.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

The only positive message in the movie is when Nat

Nathan and Karen stick together, even when it woul

Suspense and action-movie violence featuring hand-

Parents are especially affectionate and do a touch

One "f--k," plus regular use of words including "b

An Apple laptop makes a few close-up appearances,

In the opening sequence, a bunch of high-schoolers

Parents need to know that this action thriller stars Twilight hunk Taylor Lautner and rising star Lily Collins, so it's sure to attract teens. But there's a fair bit of violence, language, and intrigue that might make it too mature for tween members of Team Jacob. The more intense sequences include several…

Positive Messages

The only positive message in the movie is when Nathan's birth father says "I may be your father, but I'm not your dad," indicating that the couple who raised him are Nathan's true mother and father.

Positive Role Models

Nathan and Karen stick together, even when it would be easier for him to go off on his own, and they're courageously willing to put themselves in harm's way for each other. Nathan comes to understand why his parents demanded that he know how to defend himself and why they kept his true identity a secret.

Violence & Scariness

Suspense and action-movie violence featuring hand-to-hand brawls and weapons (mostly guns, but there's also a bomb). Nathan and his father have an extended "sparring" scene that bruises them both up and makes a hungover Nathan vomit. Although many characters are killed -- people are shot both execution style and from a sniper's distance, beaten mercilessly, thrown off a train, and blown up in an explosion -- there's very little blood. One of the most upsetting scenes is when a young girl is forced into a room and punched and terrorized by a hit man.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Parents are especially affectionate and do a touchy-feely slow dance that their son sees. A guy keeps staring intently at a girl and vice-versa. At a pool party, some girls are shown in bikinis. Nathan is shirtless in a few scenes. After an intense couple of days of hand holding and near-death experiences, Nathan and Karen share a passionate kiss that ends up with her straddling him and his hands creeping up the back of her shirt.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

One "f--k," plus regular use of words including "bulls--t," "s--t," "ass," "d--k," "hell," "freak," "Jesus" (as an exclamation) and "damn."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

An Apple laptop makes a few close-up appearances, as do an Amtrak train, an Audi, a Mustang, a BMW, and a Lexus. Major League Baseball's Pittsburgh Pirates must have cooperated with the film, because a game is part of a climactic sequence; PNC Park, Pirates paraphernalia, and the stadium's famous Roberto Clemente statue are all on full display, and Nathan wears a Clemente jersey.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

In the opening sequence, a bunch of high-schoolers drink at a weekend party. Nathan gets drunk and wakes up shirtless on the hostess' lawn. He later vomits after being forced to spar with his father.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that this action thriller stars Twilight hunk Taylor Lautner and rising star Lily Collins , so it's sure to attract teens. But there's a fair bit of violence, language, and intrigue that might make it too mature for tween members of Team Jacob. The more intense sequences include several character deaths, execution-style shootings, sniper kills, and a couple of brutal beatings, one of which results in a man being chucked out of a speeding train. Even the teen girl is terrorized and beaten. (All of that said, there's not a lot of blood here.) Swearing includes "s--t," "ass," and one "f--k"); sexuality is mostly flirting, hand holding, and slow dancing -- plus one heated make-out session between teens. An early scene shows teens drinking, including the main character, who gets very drunk. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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• Parents say (10)
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Based on 10 parent reviews

Good MovieI

What's the story.

Nathan ( Taylor Lautner ) is a high school wrestling champ with attentive, affectionate parents and a few close friends. After he's paired up in class with his neighbor, the crush-worthy Karen ( Lily Collins ), the two start researching a sociology project about missing children ... only to discover a photo of a boy who looks a lot like Nathan. Curious about the uncanny similarities, Nathan contacts the website's chatline, which is actually maintained by a nefarious foreign baddie. Before Nathan can fully confront his mom ( Maria Bello ) and dad ( Jason Isaacs ), hit men strike the house, sending Nathan and Karen on the run. Reeling with grief and confusion, Nathan and Karen are advised by his therapist, Dr. Bennett ( Sigourney Weaver ), not to trust the CIA and are left on their own to evade both government and international operatives trying to track them down.

Is It Any Good?

The best part of this John Singleton production is the sheer number of excellent actors who pop up as supporting players. In addition to Bello and Isaacs -- who have more chemistry in a couple of scenes than Collins and Lautner in the entire film -- there's Weaver, Swedish star Michael Nyqvist (of the original The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo ) and Alfred Molina , who plays a squirrelly CIA agent in charge of the mission to rescue Nathan. It makes perfect sense that Singleton recruited a cast of acclaimed actors to bolster Lautner's leading-man debut, but sadly he's not up to the task yet. If anything, he should find an ensemble where he lends support to actors like his co-stars.

As Twilight heartthrob Jacob, Lautner's intensity makes him downright irresistible -- especially if you're only paying attention to his shirtless scenes. But the truth is that as adorable as Lautner may be -- and as gifted with the physicality necessary for an action career -- he lacks the acting range to carry a movie's emotional center. The scenes of Nathan crying are painful to watch, because you can tell how difficult they were for Lautner. And the screenplay doesn't do him any favors; it has him speaking and acting in a completely unbelievable manner for a guy who's just lost his parents. Collins is cute enough, but aside from one admittedly steamy kissing scene, the two don't conjure any heat.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the amount of violence in the film. Is it cartoonish and unbelievable or realistic and disturbing? How does that affect its impact?

What are some other movies that feature the "hidden identity" theme? Why do audiences respond to orphaned characters? Name some other famous pop-culture orphans.

How does the movie portray teen drinking ? Does it have realistic consequences?

Movie Details

• In theaters : September 23, 2011
• On DVD or streaming : January 16, 2012
• Cast : Lily Collins , Sigourney Weaver , Taylor Lautner
• Director : John Singleton
• Inclusion Information : Black directors, Female actors
• Studio : Lionsgate
• Genre : Action/Adventure
• Run time : 106 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : sequences of intense violence and action, brief language, some sexual content and teen partying
• Last updated : February 13, 2024

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• DVD & Streaming
• Action/Adventure , Drama

Content Caution

In Theaters

• September 23, 2011
• Taylor Lautner as Nathan; Lily Collins as Karen; Sigourney Weaver as Dr. Bennett; Maria Bello as Mara; Jason Isaacs as Kevin; Alfred Molina as Burton; Michael Nyqvist as Kozlow

Home Release Date

• January 17, 2012
• John Singleton

Distributor

Movie review.

The statue of David is more expressive than he is. And his smoldering good looks might fool you. But Nathan is a hurting young man. We know by the way he sometimes gets snippy with his mother, or the way he sometimes tries to beat the tar out of his father while sparring. We know by the way he flexes his biceps when folks he doesn’t like walk past him at parties.

He tells Dr. Bennett, his psychiatrist, that his life sometimes feels like that of a stranger. And he has dreams about the huge, hairy beastie he turns into every time that annoyingly sparkly vampire—

Oh, no. Sorry. Wrong dream. Nathan dreams that some strange woman gets killed right in front of him. And he’s had the same dream ever since he was a little kid.

His shrink tells him that when he has that dream, he should take a deep breath and ignore it. Ignore it with all the ignorance he can possibly muster. Turn his attention to something else (practicing his smolder in front of a mirror, perhaps). Forget about digging around in his subconscious, she says. Best to just pretend its not there, bottle it all up inside and go on with life. Oh, and as far as feeling out of place … well, best to let that go too. Time’s up!

But then one night while doing a rare bit of homework, Nathan runs across a missing persons website—one that features images of what missing kids would look like years later as adults. And he discovers that one of them looks just like … Taylor Lautner! And Nathan too, of course. But before he can get some answers from his parents, they’re gunned down right in front of him. And then the ne’er-do-wells nearly kill his pretty next-door neighbor, Karen by blowing up his house.

Nathan suddenly has that sinking feeling that there may be something more going on here, something that even his smolder can’t solve.

Positive Elements

Nathan is a nice guy—or so the movie tells us. We know he’s nice because when he passes out drunk after a party in someone’s front yard, he helps pick up the trash the next morning. We know he’s nice because when he’s fleeing would-be killers and needs to push people out of his way, he apologizes. And we know he’s nice because he does his utmost to try to keep Karen from being killed.

Karen has taken a shine to Nathan too. When an assailant demands that she tell him where Nathan’s hiding, for instance, she vigorously shakes her head in refusal. Also: Nathan’s parents sacrifice their lives for him.

Spiritual Elements

Nathan finds an important card embossed with a Christian cross.

Sexual Content

We learn that Nathan and Karen kissed when they were in eighth grade—then drifted apart. Now they quickly make up for lost time, hugging and smooching and clutching like crazy inside a train’s sleeper car. They smooch some more in a deserted baseball stadium.

Nathan’s parents also clutch and kiss. And his dad says Karen’s “hot.”

It takes the film all of five minutes to contrive a way to get Taylor, er, Nathan shirtless. Karen wears midriff-revealing and low-cut outfits, and uses her sex appeal to coax someone into doing something illegal. Workout wear is skintight. We see bikini-clad women fighting at a pool party. There’s a joke about virginity.

Violent Content

Killers invade Nathan’s home and, before it’s over, one of them has his neck broken and both of Nathan’s parents are dead from gunshots. Nathan pounds one of the attackers with his fists and a fireplace poker. Then the building explodes and throws Nathan and Karen into the family pool, where debris rains down around them.

Russian bad guys shoot and kill a bevy of CIA agents (at long range). CIA agents shoot villains. A would-be assassin is snuffed out by a sniper bullet. Nathan and a bad guy tussle on the train: Twice during the fight, the bad guy lies still, eyes open and vacant, only to revive again. So Nathan ends it once and for all by throwing him out a window. Nathan hurts his fist on an evildoer’s jaw and injures his leg jumping off a ledge. He and Karen both have to leap out of a careening car. And Dr. Bennett’s vehicle explodes.

Nathan plans to shoot and kill a baddie. Karen is hit, threatened (with the amputation of her finger), and tied up and gagged. We see Nathan’s birth mother killed in flashback: A killer wearing a gas mask beats her as a mysterious vapor fills the room.

After Nathan comes home drunk one morning, his dad forces him to put on boxing gloves and spar—insulting his son as they trade leather. Nathan grows enraged, and the two begin kicking each other too. Dad punches him hard enough to make him vomit.

Crude or Profane Language

One f-word, a half-dozen or more s-words and a frosting of other profanities, including “a‑‑,” “b‑‑ch,” “d‑‑n,” “h‑‑‑” and “p‑‑‑.” God’s name and Jesus’ name are misused once each. We hear a couple of crude references to male body parts.

Drug and Alcohol Content

The first time we meet Nathan, he’s on his way to a party with two buds to get drunk. (They tell each other, “Let’s go get drunk.”) While we don’t see the level of intoxication Nathan’s friends eventually hit (all three appear to be guzzling gallons of beer), Nathan winds up passing out on the party-thrower’s front lawn. His parents drink wine with dinner.

Other Negative Elements

In a stunt sure to be emulated, Nathan rides on the hood of his friends’ truck, egging on the driver to go faster. Characters lie to one another. One of Nathan’s friends sells fake IDs and later “borrows” an elderly woman’s car. Nathan spits in someone’s face.

Taylor Lautner’s Twilight -derived star wattage will certainly draw prepubescent moviegoers into theaters, where they will watch the postpubescent pinup get drunk, beat people up, take his shirt off and glower for the camera. They will wade through a simple yet strangely incomprehensible movie in which outlandish plot devices pile up like so much lint in the dryer. Though much of the film seems cribbed from an Alfred Hitchcock-style thinking-man’s thriller, the only real thinking Abduction audiences will be doing is pondering why Sigourney Weaver agreed to appear in it.

No one is actually abducted in Abduction . Yet the title still fits like a glove as it extends to us an unintentional truth: Sit through this film and you’ll realize that two hours of your life has been taken from you, with nary a ransom note in sight.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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Screen Rant's Ben Kendrick reviews Abduction

A lot of moviegoers tend to associate director John Singleton with hard hitting dramas that, more often than not, have focused on controversial topics including socio-economic inequality and racial tensions - so, no doubt, it came as a surprise when the famed filmmaker chose to shoot a film starring Taylor Lautner.  Abduction had been sold to Lionsgate with the Twilight heart-throb already attached - with the intention of testing the young star's leading-man mettle as well as capturing his Twi-hard fan base.

Singleton is confident in the final cut of Abduction and is already talking up a sequel. However, will audiences be as impressed with the action thriller, and Lautner's headlining performance, or is the movie just an attempt by Hollywood executives to cash in on big names - without having to deliver a competent piece of entertainment?

Unfortunately Abduction is nothing more than a middle-of-the-road action-thriller that will only be satisfying to teenage fans of Lautner or less picky audiences who can suspend enough disbelief to take anything portrayed onscreen seriously: be it the overly-melodramatic relationships, predictable "twists," or the paper thin storyline. Essentially, anyone who has viewed the Abduction trailer has already been exposed to 3/4's of the overarching plot - and, as a result, there are very few surprises, or exciting moments, to make a trip to the theater worth the cost of admission.

As mentioned, despite allusions to the contrary in the film's marketing, the Abduction story is pretty basic: Nathan Price (Taylor Lautner) is a high school kid who feels out of place (like most high school kids). However, after Price and his neighbor, Karen Lowell (Lily Collins), find a childhood picture of him (as well as a computer-rendered image of what he would look like now) on a missing person's website, the teenager is thrown into a massive government conspiracy - and, subsequently, a run-for-your-life adventure. Hot on his heels are a variety of mysterious people - such as Frank Burton (Alfred Molina) and Dr. Bennett (Sigourney Weaver) to name a few - all with hazy motivations. In order to stop running, and get back to a "normal" life, Price is forced into a series of dangerous altercations in a desperate attempt to uncover the truth about his past.

Throughout the runtime, Abduction appears to fancy itself much smarter than what actually plays out onscreen would indicate. This is a film that takes itself very seriously - with very few comedic moments and a few pretty brutal altercations (especially considering the film's PG-13 rating). As a result, the movie is a mishmash of "moments" that the filmmakers must have felt were important for "telling" Price's character arc - robbing the proceedings of credibility as each of these isolated moments undermine prior scenes and don't successfully build upon each other.

For example (being as vague as possible), there's a character that is identified early on in the film as someone Price can trust and, when things get out of hand, he and Lowell decide to head across the country to rendezvous with said person - until they hit a bump in the road and the plot line is completely derailed (and the aforementioned character vanishes from the story, never to be mentioned again). This might sound like a minor thing but if you were to chart the actual movement of the characters in Abduction , you'd quickly discover that there's a significant amount of "filler" - Price and Co. backtracking ground and retreading story ideas. The film lacks a real narrative drive and, for a story about people on the run, most of the characters are just wandering in circles - which, given a predictable and awkward plot, is especially boring to watch.

As mentioned, Lautner has been attached to Abduction for a long time - with studio heads no doubt testing his leading man muscle. Surely, Lautner handles himself well in some of the more physical moments of the film - he appears to have done a lot of his own running, jumping, and fighting - but falls entirely flat in intimate character moments. Despite a truly horrendous set of circumstances that occur in the first act of the movie, Price does very little but lower his eyebrows and pace around. It's unfortunate because, watching Abduction , it's easy to imagine Lautner (with a few more years under his belt) able to succeed in the same market Sam Worthington has been culling over the last few years - relying on physical/strong but silent type roles. However, Hollywood (in a mad rush to capitalize on the young actor's Twilight profile) has pushed him out the gate too soon - and undercut his chances of headlining another character-focused action thriller for awhile.

The rest of the cast is serviceable but bland. Alfred Molina and Sigourney Weaver are completely wasted (and have some of the worst lines that either actor has likely ever delivered). Ultimately, these characters are reduced to outlines who, as the story progresses, could have added a lot to the proceedings - if they had been given more to work with. Lilly Collins actually offers the most compelling performance in the movie - even elevating some of the scenes where Lautner isn't particularly convincing - as Price drags her character from one messed up scenario on to another. She's a competent addition and about the only cast member who seemed to know that the film wasn't going to get by on plot, melodrama, and Lautner's name alone.

In the end, there's very little to celebrate in Abduction. Aside from a few of the more physical moments in movie, the story is generic and cliche', the characters are one dimensional shells with little to do but run from place to place, and the performances are stilted at best and, more often than not, completely cheesy. Fans of Taylor Lautner will likely be satisfied by seeing the actor try on his leading man chops as well as enjoy the five separate occasions where the Twilight star takes off his shirt but, for fans of worthwhile trips to the theater, Abduction is hard to recommend.

If you’re still on the fence about  Abduction , check out the trailer below:

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Follow me on Twitter @ benkendrick  - and let us know what you thought of the film below:

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Abduction (2019) Review

“Abduction” Theatrical Poster

AKA: Twilight Zodiac Director: Ernie Barbarash Cast: Scott Adkins, Andy On, Truong Ngoc Anh, Lily Ji, Aki Aleong, Daniel Whyte, Mike Leeder, Tom Caserto, Brahim Chab, Philippe Joly, Semiquaver Iafeta, Jai Day Running Time: 98 min.

By Paul Bramhall

I confess to having intentionally avoided the Scott Adkins vehicle Abduction in 2019. In a year which saw the British martial arts star either headline or feature in the likes of Avengement , Triple Threat , and Ip Man 4: The Finale , the Roger Corman produced sci-fi romp backed by China felt like it had a “we all have bills to pay” vibe written all over it. You know the ones that occasionally pop up in any actor’s filmography who isn’t regularly headlining big budget Hollywood productions – Incoming , Green Street 3: Never Back Down , Legendary , the list goes on. It had always remained a curiosity somewhere in the back of my mind though, so as 2020 draws to a close I decided to give it a go (I know, checking out a movie a year after it was released is no biggie, but Adkins cranks them out so fast that Abduction  is already 7 movies ago).

The main draw behind Abduction is the reunion of Adkins and Andy On, 17 years after they went head to head in the Tsui Hark directed 2002 Hong Kong flick Black Mask 2: City of Masks , back when they were both starting out in the industry. In a word of warning, anyone hoping to see the pair in a slightly less out-there tale than what their first outing offered (in short – Adkins as a mad scientist mixing up the DNA of pro-wrestlers with animals) will be left disappointed. While there’s no pro-wrestlers in sight, instead we have an alien race who’ve parked up above a fountain in Vietnam (invisibly, of course), and need human qi to be able to return home. We learn that some people have stronger qi than others, which includes Adkins’ daughter and On’s wife, so when they’re both kidnapped by the aliens to be drained of their lifeforce, the pair team up to rescue their abducted loved ones.

Before proceeding any further, I should point out that the Blu-ray of Abduction (yes, we love our physical media here at COF) comes with 2 versions of the movie – the producers cut, and the director’s cut. The version being reviewed here is the director’s cut. The director in question is Ernie Barbarash, a journeyman director who exclusively works in the DTV field. Barbarash has worked with Adkins before on 2011’s unremarkable Assassination Games , which pitted Adkins against his childhood hero Jean Claude Van Damme. In addition to Assassination Games , he also helmed the Van Damme vehicles 6 Bullets and Pound of Flesh , as well as the Michael Jai White actioner Falcon Rising . While none of them match up to the DTV action flicks that the likes of Isaac Florentine and Jesse V. Johnson crank out, at best Barbarash’s work is passable entertainment, at worst mediocre and plodding.

The out-there plot then could well be what results in Abduction  being so entertaining. Working from a script by Mike MacLean, whose illustrious credits include penning Dinocroc vs. Supergator , Sharktopus , and Piranhaconda (notably all also produced by Roger Corman), the fact that Abduction doesn’t take itself too seriously is arguably its biggest strength. Until they officially team-up, Adkins and On mostly act as if they’re in 2 completely different movies, which works in the narratives favour. After being kicked out of the alien’s base in the opening scene and finding himself in a fountain in the middle of Ho Chi Minh, Adkins realises he has no memory and is stuck with a stutter.

Playing his character like a mix of Adam Sandler in The Waterboy and Frank Spencer from Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em , it’s a rare comedic performance from the British thespian, and it surprisingly hits all the right notes. While Adkins stumbles around Ho Chi Minh trying to remember who he is and being slapped in the face by locals before he can spit out what he wants to say, On on (no spellcheck, this isn’t a double up of word usage) the other hand plays a poker faced former military man turned assassin under the employment of the local Chinese gang boss. After doing one last job to send a message to a rival gang trying to encroach on the Chinese’s turf, he wakes up one morning to find his wife gone, and despite having what he assumes was a dream about the aliens abducting her, believes it was the rival gang taking revenge and goes on the warpath.

The two men are eventually brought together by Vietnamese actress Truong Ngoc Anh, the star of the still unreleased in the west Vietnamese action flick Tracer . Ngoc Anh plays a psychiatrist who ends up with Adkins on her couch, and although reluctant to believe his story about aliens abducting his daughter, after she visits the park and meets an equally befuddled On who teleports in front of her eyes, she decides to connect the pair. Soon the truth about the aliens is revealed, and if they don’t get their victims “strong and beautiful qi” they choose to eat them “like chicken”!

Despite how goofy everything sounds so far, there are elements of the sci-fi concept which are actually rather cool. The alien’s ability to split reality is visualised through On opening the bedroom door to find the aliens abducting his wife, and the bedroom floating off into space while On remains stuck in the doorway (think the hypnotism scene in Get Out for reference). It’s clearly budget friendly, but nevertheless proves an effective way to convey the concept. Small touches like the fact whenever On tries to enter the bedroom after the event results in nausea and disorientation further help to establish the rules of the world Abduction takes place in. Speaking of hypnotism, I confess the scene contained here involving Ngoc Anh hypnotising Adkins is probably one of the funniest ever committed to screen, and unlike a lot of his performance, I don’t think this particular instance was intentional.

But let’s be honest, nobody is clocking into an Adkins flick to see how well he can act hypnotised, we’re here for the action. Thankfully Abduction gives both Adkins and On a number of opportunities to strut their stuff. The fight choreography is handled by Tim Man, who by this point has worked with Adkins on multiple occasions as both choreographer and occasional onscreen opponent, with assistance from the main villain of Boyka: Undisputed , Brahim Achabbakhe. Achabbakhe gets to pull double duty, playing the head henchman of the rival gang On goes after, as well as one of the aliens. On gets into brief scuffles with both characters, with the outcome of one definitely more successful than the other. Adkins and On also get to team-up for an entertaining 2 vs 2 battle against HK regulars Tom Caserto ( Big Brother ) and Semiquaver Iafeta ( Helios ), which involves some nice impacts and grappling.

The highlight for the fight action though goes to a battle between Adkins and On, resulting from Adkins being taken over by the aliens, and effectively becoming a kung-fu terminator. In an interview I did with him in 2018 he’d mentioned he was carrying a few injuries while filming Abduction (which at the time was going by the title Twilight Zodiac ), however based on this fight you can’t tell. The flashy aerial kicks may be absent, but I enjoyed the more grounded aspect of it, and the presence of On feels like it brings an element of the classic HK choreography style. There’s a nice flow of exchanges, and Adkins genuinely feels like a force to be reckoned with, conveying plenty of power behind his blows.

If anything, I was a victim of my own expectations when it came to the finale. Having seen Achabbakhe return as one of the aliens after his role as a henchman, I’d been expecting things to build up to a confrontation pitting Adkins and On against his enhanced skills, and nobody choreographs a 2 versus 1 fight quite like Tim Man! But alas it wasn’t to be, and instead the real finale is martial arts free, instead opting for some sacrificial heroics to stop the victim’s qi from opening a portal back to the alien’s home world. It’s enjoyable, and involves the kind of cheesy low budget CGI that used to populate early 2000’s sci-fi B movies. It sounds like a negative, but I find low budget CGI being used to create an effect that can’t be done practically much more charming than big budget CGI explosions and fire, so it anything it only contributes to Abduction’s B-movie appeal.

Seeing Adkins play somewhat against type, combined with On who we frankly don’t see enough of, easily make Abduction worth a watch. The fact that it’s about qi sucking aliens in Vietnam, well, that’s just a welcome bonus.

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 7/10

15 Responses to Abduction (2019) Review

About time Paul!!! Been waiting for your review for this film for ages. isn’t CHINESE FILM expert Mike Leeder is in this one as a bloody leather face guy… I keep on seeing photos of him in full costume on social media… does he gets his ass beat by Andy On?

The answer to all of your questions is – yes! Rumour has it that Leeder is actually playing the same character as he did in ‘Fearless’, so if you’re interested to learn about the referees fate 13 years on, this is the place to be.

We should also point out that this review is dedicated to Dan Hagen!

Hey, thanks for the shout-out! Life’s been wearing on me these past few days, so it was a nice surprise to wake up this morning and see this.

The initial vibe I got from Abduction wasn’t too dissimilar from yours. I ended up putting it on one night while doing laundry, with a very casual “let’s see what the hell this thing is” kind of approach. What I ended up getting was a fun, warm-hearted sci-fi action flick, with both Scott Adkins and Andy On putting on strong and likeable performances.

I had no idea there were two different cuts. The version I watched was simply streamed off of VUDU (no physical), and a little bit of investigation leads me to believe that this may have been the shorter producer’s cut. While I doubt there’s much difference, the blu-ray’s already been on my wishlist for a while now, so, hey… there’s one more excuse for me to finally buy it. 🙂

Excellent review as always. Cheers.

Cheers Dan, and we can now make if official, you’re a COF influencer! (The 2nd most sought after influencer title after Instagram :-D)

NO PAUL ! NO ! YOU WILL NOT GIVE THIS A HIGHER RATING THAN SEIZED ! NO !

C’mon, this was far more entertaining than ‘Seized’ ! The good news is, the soon to be released millennial romantic thriller ‘Dead Reckoning’ got a lower rating, which now looks like it’ll be kicking off the 2021 Scott Adkins-athon.

Also Paul what exactly is the difference between the Producer’s cut and the Director’s cut of this film ? :O

That’s a good question, I did fast forward through the Producer’s cut, and honestly didn’t notice any discernible difference. Maybe co-producer Mike Leeder could shed some light on the matter?

I definitely liked this better than Legacy of Lies.

the years had taken their toll on Referee Randall, but the Aliens did offer a steady supply of wellington boots and coco pies, and a man has to live!

A lot of fun making the movie in both Vietnam and China, we had a great team and i managed to craxk my sternum fighting Andy On(my fault) which was fun!

The difference between the two cuts were very minimal, I think it was just a couple of dialogue beats

While the Iqiyi version is a bit more Andy focused in the edit

I had a decent time watching Abduction. As I’ve mentioned before, the movie felt like it was written by Giorgio A. Tsoukalos from that aliens show, and there seemed to be some influence from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

The beginning with Scot Adkins’ stutter made me cringe, but the action beats were good. I’m glad that Scott Adkins and Andy On were given a proper fight scene together after that messily choreographed fight in Black Mask 2.

What are some other good movies with Andy On that show off his abilities? I need to explore his filmography some more.

Also, I re-watched the fight scene at the end where Scott Adkins becomes imbued with alien powers, and it made me realize that I need another Universal Soldier movie ASAP.

Hey Dan. There’s a few! For me my overall favorite fighting performance of his is in Dennis Law’s ‘Bad Blood’ (inexplicably re-titled ‘King of Triads’ for its US release) from 2010, the same year he had what’s probably his most distinctive performance, as the villain in Yuen Woo-Ping’s ‘True Legend’ . He’s fought Donnie Yen twice, playing the villain in both 2011’s ‘The Lost Bladesman’ and 2013’s ‘Special ID’ (in which he ironically replaced Vincent Zhao, his co-star in ‘True Legend’ ). He’s close with fellow thespian Philip Ng, and their co-starring roles facing off against each in 2014’s ‘Once Upon a Time in Shanghai’ and 2019’s ‘Undercover Punch and Gun’ are both worth a watch. For outright fun, it’s hard to go wrong with 2014’s ‘Zombie Fight Club’ .

I finally caught this and agree with Paul, that large chunks of Abduction feel like 2 movies haphazardly stitched together, and unfortunately I was more interested in the half NOT having Scott Adkins.

I was wishing I could have seen more of Andy On as a slick assassin facing down Russian mobsters as opposed to Stuttering Scott hunting down inter-dimensional aliens harvesting DNA and rebuilding some super feng shui compass to get home.

I checked this out for Adkins but it’s On who walks away with the movie’s coolest scene: Offering his captors tea and snacks before beating seven bells out of them. Abduction could have used more of such scenes.

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Abduction (United States, 2011)

Perhaps the only way to approach Abduction that will not result in a 105-minute boredom-induced coma is to think of it as a comedy, preferably with a drinking game attached. There are laughs to be had, although none of them are intentional. Girls (and gay guys) enraptured by Taylor Lautner's smoldering eyes and well-formed pecs aren't likely to be overly concerned about his wooden dialogue delivery or unchanging facial expression, but everyone else will be chortling. This is a miscasting of mammoth proportions.

It boggles the mind that someone thought Lautner could make it as an action hero. On some level, I suppose it makes sense. Looking at a specimen like Arnold Schwarzenegger, arguably the biggest action icon of the '80s, one could develop a model: nice chest, bulging biceps, limited emotional range, incomprehensible dialogue delivery. The problem is, Schwarzenegger was always a "man's man," whereas Lautner is generally despised by straight males of all ages. That makes Abduction an action/thriller with females as its primary audience, which is box office poison. Over the years, with rare exceptions, action films have struck gold on the strength of teenage boys.

Abduction starts out in suburban Pittsburgh, where Nathan (Lautner) lives in high school bliss with his mother, Mara (Maria Bello), and father, Kevin (Jason Isaacs). He has a crush on the unbelievably hot girl across the street, Karen (Lily Collins), but, other than staring at each other with deep, soulful looks (lingeringly captured by Peter Menzies Jr.'s camera), they don't do much in the way of interaction. Nathan's life falls apart when, one day while surfing the web for a school research project, he stumbles upon a "missing children" website that leads him to believe his mom and dad may not be his real mom and dad. Some bad guys, led by rogue assassin Kozlow (Michael Nyquist, the male protagonist in the Swedish version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels), are suddenly after him, as is the CIA, led by Agent Burton (Alfred Molina). Once his "parents" are dispatched, Nathan's only allies are Karen and Nathan's shrink, Dr. Bennett (Sigourney Weaver), who becomes like Obi-Wan Kenobi in a pantsuit.

First of all, it must be acknowledged that the storyline for Abduction is shit. It's not silly or campy or deliciously over-the-top. It's mind numbingly awful. It rarely makes sense and seems to have been made for people who routinely don't pay attention or spend half the movie texting and visiting the snack bar. The movie ends with a huge WTF? anti-climax. I can never remember an action film concluding in quite such a lame manner. It doesn't quite fall into the deus ex machina family, but it's close. Can anyone imagine Arnold or Sly allowing one of their movies to end this way? What happened to the basic rule that the hero and the villain must go at it one-on-one?

The director is John Singleton. That John Singleton. The one who made his feature debut with the searing Boyz 'N the Hood . Admittedly, he's done his share of slumming since then, but this represents a new low. The man must have been hard up for work to agree to helm something this lifeless.

Singleton goes to great pains to draw a double line between the good and the bad. (The whole movie is ugly.) This is perfectly illustrated during a high profile chase through the concourse of the Pirates' baseball stadium. Nathan runs around people and, when he accidentally bumps into one, he pauses to apologize. Kozlow, on the other hand, plows through pedestrians, knocking them over with abandon, as if he's playing a video game in which points are tallied by collisions with innocent bystanders. Abduction also features a fight on a train that may have been inspired by the classic one in From Russia with Love , but it's hard to tell. The similarities could be a coincidence, and the intensity of the battle is more than a notch lower.

Lautner's limitations are on display from his first scene. Admittedly, he should not be judged based on his performance in Twilight and its sequels; those movies have an uncanny ability to suck the life out of even the most talented performers (Kristen Stewart, Dakota Fanning). However, if Abduction represents Lautner at his best, he won't be playing Hamlet any time soon. He is well-matched in Lily Collins, who equals him in both physical attractiveness and thespian ability. Whereas Lautner's expression is always one of brooding indifference, hers is one of whiny pouting. They spend a lot of time staring at one another, and even make out once, but there's no hanky panky. This is PG-13, after all. Lautner doffs his shirt twice. Alas, the topless count for Collins is zero. This is PG-13, after all.

Singleton has amped up the "star quality" of the production by recruiting "names" for secondary roles, probably in the vain hope that their presence will lend a patina of respectability to this misbegotten production. Their screen time disqualifies them for more than an extended cameo. Maria Bello and Jason Isaacs are eliminated at the end of a long and tedious introductory segment. Alfred Molina, who looks like he's wearing one of William Shatner's old toupees and has undergone some sort of face transplant, appears from time-to-time at key moments but never sticks around. And Sigourney Weaver shows up long enough to pick up her paycheck. Maybe she heard Ghostbusters III calling.

The bottom line is simple: Abduction (a title which makes no sense, by the way) has been made exclusively for the Taylor Lautner faithful. No other audience could focus exclusively on the actor's looks and ignore everything else in the movie. Card-carrying member of Lautner's fan club will be delighted because he's on screen for about 100 minutes, does the James Dean thing on a motorcycle, flexes his muscles at every opportunity, and strips down to his pants on a couple of occasions. For those who are indifferent to Lautner or who don't like him, the only way to survive Abduction is under the influence of a controlled substance, and even that may not be enough.

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Movie Review | 'Abduction'

At Least His Abs Get a Workout

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By Stephen Holden

• Sept. 22, 2011

“You will then be responsible for the death of all your friends ... on Facebook,” the archvillain (Michael Nyqvist) of the risible thriller “Abduction” warns the baby-faced Nathan Harper (Taylor Lautner), a sort of teenage Jason Bourne in search of his true identity. Did I say risible? At the screening I attended, that threat prompted hoots of derisive laughter, as did other howlers, including, “I’m not dying here; there’s a bomb in the oven.”

A joke? Oh, if only.

Directed by John Singleton (“Four Brothers,” “2 Fast 2 Furious”), from a screenplay by Shawn Christensen, “Abduction” is a sloppy, exploitative act of star worship created (if that’s the right word for cynical hackwork) around Mr. Lautner, the pouty 19-year-old heartthrob of the “Twilight” franchise. The camera swoons around him as if he were a priceless sculpture, often moving in for extreme close-ups. The movie stops in its tracks long enough to ogle an extended smooch whose slurping seems scientifically calculated to take things to the brink of an R rating.

To give Mr. Lautner his due, he is a martial-arts dervish with perfectly sculptured abs. His acting, however, is another matter. I can’t recall another teenage star so opaque. If his physiognomy — recessed eyes that don’t seem to focus, a wide snub nose and Elvis-y lips — conjure Neanderthal manhood after a cosmetic makeover, his boyish monotone with its utter lack of inflection suggests that he is really an advanced robot simulating human speech without registering emotion or even comprehension.

Throughout most of the movie, Nathan is on the run with his across-the-street neighbor and high-school classmate Karen (Lily Collins), who, like Nathan, loses her sultry mystique once she opens her mouth. They are pursued by two small armies, one made up of C.I.A. officers, the other of Eastern European goons, who finally clash at a Pittsburgh Pirates game; both sides are desperately searching for a list of spies encrypted in a cellphone that landed in Nathan’s hands.

Don’t ask about the whys and wherefores; I doubt whether even the screenwriter could tell you. Reputable actors like Alfred Molina, Sigourney Weaver, Jason Isaacs and Maria Bello are on hand, but they can’t paper over the fatuity of the two leads and the screenplay’s gaping holes.

The trouble begins when Nathan comes across a photograph of his 3 1/2-year-old self on a missing-children Web site, a cyber fishing expedition that directs the baddies to his home, where they storm the place and kill his parents minutes after he discovers he is not their biological son. As a mad chase ensues, “Abduction” stokes the illusion that Nathan is suddenly the most important person in the world. Any self-centered teenager can identify with that.

“Abduction” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has extreme violence.

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Directed by John Singleton; written by Shawn Christensen; director of photography, Peter Menzies Jr.; edited by Bruce Cannon; music by Edward Shearmur; production design by Keith Brian Burns; costumes by Ruth Carter; produced by Doug Davison, Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, Lee Stollman, Roy Lee, Dan Lautner and Pat Crowley; released by Lionsgate. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes.

WITH: Taylor Lautner (Nathan), Lily Collins (Karen), Alfred Molina (Burton), Jason Isaacs (Kevin), Maria Bello (Mara), Sigourney Weaver (Dr. Bennett), Denzel Whitaker (Gilly) and Michael Nyqvist (Kozlow).

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Abduction – review

F or his first proper post-Twilight role, Taylor Lautner, he of the fab abs and dazzling gnashers, has plumped for a part in which he must keep his shirt on, and act quite a lot. You'd question his judgment, were you not otherwise goggling as one respected thesp after another runs onscreen to blush through exposition about how Lautner's real parents were top spies (he's seen his own photo on a missing kids website) and he's been covertly groomed to be a lethal assassin. Alfred Molina, even Jason Isaacs, you can forgive. But Sigourney Weaver ? After Avatar, surely she doesn't need the cash? Still, there are plenty of inadvertent pleasures on offer, not least when the Russian super-villain threatens to kill not just our hero's new squeeze but all his friends on Facebook. Take heed, teens: digital popularity can have its pitfalls.

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"Entertaining, Inspiring Finish"

What You Need To Know:

(BB, PP, Ro, Pa, C, LL, VV, S, N, AA, M) Strong moral, patriotic worldview overall, marred slightly by some Romantic, pagan behavior, plus a couple light references to the Christian Cross; 13 obscenities (including one “f” word), one strong “J” profanity and three light exclamatory profanities, plus teenager has hangover and vomits and is grounded for drinking; some strong and light action violence includes bomb in oven explodes, men shoot teenager’s adoptive parents, adoptive mother who turns out to be a CIA agent fights with one thug, man kill’s boy’s biological mother with deadly gas, distant explosion of a car, villains shoot agents protecting teenager and his girlfriend, man hits teenage girl and ties her up and gags her, teenager fights villain in train compartment and eventually knocks him out, teenager throws villain off speeding train, chase scene thru hospital, villain shot dead, boxing between teenager and adoptive father gets a bit rough, villain threatens girlfriend’s parents when they fly back from Europe; no sex scenes but passionate and intense kissing between two teenage high school seniors, teenager shouts the “b” word and hero’s teenage friend lightly laments he’s a virgin; brief upper male nudity and young women in bikinis at party where there’s a pool; underage alcohol use and teenage drunkenness, plus teenager is grounded for a week for staying out and coming home with a hangover the next morning; no smoking or drugs; and, teenage protagonist argues with the father who raised him but doesn’t know he’s adopted, adoptive father punishes son by goading him during boxing training but it turns out father has a secret positive intent for what he’s doing, parents neglect to tell son he’s adopted but it’s partly to keep him safe from his real father’s enemies and potential enemies, youthful partying at fancy house where apparently college-age daughter’s parents are away, traitor exposed.

More Detail:

ABDUCTION isn’t record-breaking entertainment, but it’s a fun, solid movie that earns its kudos by the time of the exciting ending, which has a good finish that may leave most viewers wanting more. Which is just what the director, John Singleton, has already announced when he recently told the press a sequel is already in the works, whatever the box office for this first movie turns out to be.

The movie opens in an edgy way, however. Young high school senior, Nathan (played by young acting heartthrob Taylor Lautner of THE TWILIGHT SAGA), and his two buddies break into a college party at a fancy estate. Nate clearly gets soused and wakes up the next morning on the lawn. Back at home, his mother, Mara, grounds him for a week, and his father, Kevin, gives him a harsh boxing lesson. Mara interrupts the lesson before the male testosterone gets out of hand.

Apparently, Nathan has an anger problem that almost landed him in Juvenile Hall a year ago, but he’s gotten it mostly under control, or so his therapist (played by Sigourney Weaver) tells him. Nathan still suffers from nightmares, however, about a child’s mother being attacked while the child hides under the bed.

At school, Nathan is partnered with Karen, the beautiful girl across the street who Nathan likes but hasn’t dated, on a class paper about missing children. While working on their computers together at Nathan’s house, Nathan finds a child photo that looks like him on a website about missing children. He messages the site for more information, but the woman who answers him back turns out to be an Eastern European thug who alerts his Serbian boss in England, a man named Kozlow, that they’ve found Nathan.

Nathan’s mother admits to him he’s not their biological son. Just then, however, two men come looking for Nathan. Soon, Nathan and Karen are running from the bad guys. They find themselves in an international spy plot that sends Nathan on a quest to find his real father and mother.

Some minor parts of the dialogue and plot developments in ABDUCTED are goofy and predictable, but the movie becomes more interesting the more Nathan learns about his real mother and father. Everything leads to a really nice finish that extols family, adoption and patriotism. Enough questions are left open about the hero’s parents, however, to ensure a sequel.

In one sense, ABDUCTION is like a fairy tale, and it’s structured like a fairy tale. In many fairy tales, the hero or heroine finds themselves in a situation where their family has been attacked in some way by the villain or villains. In such fairy tales, the hero or heroine often undergoes a journey to defeat the villain and restore the family or repair what has been lost. ABDUCTION follows this pattern but has an ending that doesn’t fully complete the pattern but that could lead to a completion of the pattern in the sequel, or perhaps even a third movie.

Ultimately, ABDUCTION turns out to be an inspiring action movie for mature teenagers. Though Nathan learns his lesson about drinking alcohol, caution is still advised because of the movie’s youthful party scene, passionate kissing between Nathan and Karen, violence, and some foul language.

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The Ending Of Abduction Explained

Taylor Lautner is best known for one of two roles: the shark-like preteen with anger issues in "The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl" and his stint as the sweet yet strong Jacob Black in the "Twilight" series. After he became a household name thanks to the latter series, he branched out and tried his hand at lead roles . Unfortunately for him, his first foray as the leading man didn't go very well, and his 2011 mystery thriller "Abduction" is still clinging to a 5% rating on Rotten Tomatoes .

"Abduction" had all the components to be a hit: action, romance, and plenty of twists. It featured Lautner as Nathan Harper, a high school teen who realizes his mom Mara (Maria Bello) and dad Kevin (Jason Isaacs) are not actually his biological parents. As soon as Nathan confirms his suspicions, Mara and Kevin are killed by mysterious operatives, and Nathan goes into hiding with his classmate Karen Murphy (Lily Collins) , who gets wrapped up in the mess. The bulk of the film is about Nathan and Karen running from the mysterious forces that want to hurt him, while attempting to discover the truth about his family history.

While "Abduction" was a bit of a mess, the ending left us with even more questions that will probably never be answered.

What just happened?

At the end of "Abduction," Nathan comes face-to-face with the main villlain, Nikola Kozlow (Michael Nyqvist). Seconds before Kozlow pulls the trigger to kill Nathan, a sniper takes Kozlow out. Nathan then gets on a phone call with his biological father, Martin Price (Dermot Mulroney), who not only shot Kozlow but has pulled some strings and managed to convince everyone to leave Nathan and Karen alone to live in peace.

"Abduction" ultimately had a happy ending, but the twisty-turny plot still left us with plenty of questions. Why does Martin have such a huge pull with the CIA? What is the purpose of Nathan being shirtless so often? How did no other passengers on the train hear the intense fight? As an MTV review succinctly put it, "Moments like these happen pretty consistently for the entirety of the film. It was a never-ending barrage of things that didn't make sense, whether small and subtly incompetent or glaringly over-the-top examples of idiocy, it was incessant." While we were happy to see everything wrap up nicely, there wasn't much of an explanation as to how things were taken care of — we sort of just have to accept that they were.

Abduction hurt Taylor Lautner's career

Though many action movies do well enough to pump out a few sequels, "Abduction" had such a negative reception that it's no shock the franchise ended there. What was a bit surprising was the negative effect "Abduction" seemed to have on Lautner's acting career. Aside from an overall Metsacore rating of 25 , Lautner's performance in the film was also overwhelmingly panned by critics. Catherine Brown of Filmink wrote "[Director John] Singleton is poorly equipped to handle teenage angst, a fact made far worse by cringe-worthy dialogue and a wooden leading man who proves that he has not yet developed the skills required to carry a film." A less harsh review came from Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly , who noted that Lautner "[isn't] a terrible actor, but if he wants a career after the Twilight fades, he'll pick better films."

Lautner has been in a few other projects since "Abduction," but he has yet to shake the reputation that precedes him. Hopefully, if he never makes a full-time return to acting, he has wisely invested his "Twilight" earnings. 

Movie Reviews

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The found-footage trend shows no signs of dying out any time soon, and much of it is tiresome, but director Matty Beckerman has given us a creepy and energetic found-footage thriller with "Alien Abduction," the story of a family of campers hunted down by hostile alien creatures through the woods of Black Mountain, North Carolina.

The film has, as its real-life hook, the phenomenon of the " Brown Mountain Lights ," which has launched an atmosphere of speculation and conspiracy theories, straight from the Paranormal Playbook. "Everybody up here knows something weird's going on," says Sean ( Jeff Bowser ), a backwoods guy in "Alien Abduction" who lives in an unheated shack in the Brown Mountain woods. Lights are seen moving in strange geometric patterns above the mountains. There are multiple mysterious disappearances every year. It is thought that the lights are somehow connected to the disappearances.

"Alien Abduction" opens like a documentary, showing interviews with physicists and paranormal researchers, who all say that the Brown Mountain Lights cannot be explained, and the situation surely warrants more research. The footage of the film is said to be "leaked" from the U.S. Air Force, whose creation of Project Blue Book in 1952 helped form the paranoid atmosphere on Brown Mountain. Project Blue Book was set up to analyze UFO data and ascertain whether or not UFOs (if they existed) posed any threat to national security.  The problem with a lot of found-footage films is the amount of disbelief one needs to suspend in order to accept that people would keep filming through hair-raising moments of terror. Put the camera down and run for your lives! In "Alien Abduction," the camera is in the hands of Riley Morris ( Riley Polanski ), an 11-year-old autistic boy, who films everything in his life because it helps him engage with the world. The device is a bit too neat, not to mention reductive, but it works.

The Morris family, parents and three kids, are on a family camping trip. The mood in the car is jovial. On their first night camping, the three kids look up and see strange lights moving in the night sky. The lights move in tandem in a triangular formation, before jutting off at right angles. Those are no stars.

Things get distinctly creepier the following day, and the panicked family find refuge in the cabin of Sean, the backwoods guy. At first it seems that Sean may have strolled right out of " Deliverance ," showing resentment about the city folk who come up here to his mountain, but he becomes an important and even heroic figure. The eldest son, a teenager named Corey ( Corey Eid ), has a small character arc that gives us an emotional pay-off. "Alien Abduction" even takes the time to give us a quiet and beautiful shot of Sean and Corey sitting on the front porch of the shack, waiting, staring out into the green forest, rifles cocked and ready.

The alien encroachment is suggested by swooping white high-beams appearing in the windows, the blinding light seeping through the cracks in the walls, pouring down through the floorboards. It's old-fashioned terror, and less is definitely more. There is one long shot of a country road covered in dead crows that is hair-raising in its eerie and awful simplicity. Beckerman intersperses the footage with static, loud and jagged, and the couple of "effects" included are quick and dirty. If you're going to go the found-footage route, you might as well try to find a new way to approach the material. Beckerman has.

Sheila O'Malley

Sheila O'Malley received a BFA in Theatre from the University of Rhode Island and a Master's in Acting from the Actors Studio MFA Program. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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The 13 Worst Horror Movies of All Time, Ranked According to Rotten Tomatoes

Oh, the terror! ...And not in a good way.

Right now, audiences are living in a golden age of horror. "Elevated horror" has been on the rise for nearly a decade, and over the past year or two, it's become apparent that the beloved slasher movie is back with a vengeance. Also, as has always been the case, the reality is there are a ton of terrible horror films out there. Then, now, and forever.

Horror movies are cheap to produce and infamously profitable, so they're churned out incessantly. So it makes sense that a relatively high ratio is pure junk. According to critics on Rotten Tomatoes, these are the absolute worst horror movies ever made , ranging from woefully lame and uneventful action horror films such as House of the Dead to lifeless Hollywood J-Horror remake One Missed Call .

13 'Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey' (2023)

Rotten tomatoes score: 3%.

One of the more infamous horror movies and so-bad-it's-good movies of the modern era (though some argue it's just plain bad) Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey is the first in what's sure to be an era of uninspired IP mining. The crudely animated opening (the best part of the movie by a mile) lays the premise: After Christopher Robin abandons his childhood friends (you know, the plus novelties), Eeyore is devoured by the others as they're on the verge of starvation. Henceforth, the

Many will tell you there is no enjoyment to be found here, that Blood and Honey is just irredeemable trash. Not so! So long as you're in the mood for a formulaic, shameless slasher movie that looks like it cost hundreds of dollars to make, it's an artistically bankrupt, ironic good time. A sequel followed one year later to more positive, though overall still negative critical notices.

Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey

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After Christopher Robin abandons them for college, Pooh and Piglet embark on a bloody rampage as they search for a new source of food.

12 'House of the Dead' (2003)

Uwe Boll will make more than one appearance on this list (and possibly many, many "worst" lists). One of his most maligned movies is this early-aughts adaptation of the rail shooter arcade game of the same name, which somehow feels less substantial than its source material. The movie illustrates a fictional island infested by zombies that forces its survivors to fight for a way out. Things go south when a group of college students travel to the mysterious island to attend a rave.

House of the Dead is most infamous for playing video game footage over its (headache-inducing, flatly staged) action sequences , surely one of the most remarkably lazy directing calls on record. It's overall not a good zombie film , and it will surely (at least according to Rotten Tomatoes critics, anyway) go down as one of the worst in the genre.

House of the Dead

11 'the apparition' (2012).

A solid cast including Ashley Greene , Sebastian Stan and Tom Felton have nothing to work with in an ostensibly spooky thriller that's about as non-threatening and meh as its title. Greene and Stan play a couple plagued by a mysterious, parasitic presence in their home. It's an unoriginal, downright derivative premise to begin with, and to make matters worse the ending was fully spoiled in the trailer.

Director Todd Lincoln was at one point reportedly in talks to direct a remake of revered horror tale The Fly . It's not much of a challenge to speculate The Apparition ' s critical pummeling and paltry $6.4 million worldwide box-office gross contributed to that not happening.

The Apparition

10 'feardotcom' (2002).

The uncertainty of the cyber world lends itself to terror (the Unfriended movies and especially Host mined this pretty well), and in 2002 it felt like the perfect time to jump on that. This William Malone movie follows detective Mike Reilly ( Stephen Dorff ) and Department of Health researcher Terry Huston ( Natascha McElhone ) as they team up to uncover the cause behind four inexplicable deaths.

Unfortunately, aside from fleeting moments of stylishness, Feardotcom is ugly, blandly gruesome — and worse, boring. Although the dialogues are relatively bad and the editing is questionable, Malone's film's worst sin is arguably a total waste of brilliant character actors : Stephen Dorff , Natascha McElhone , Udo Kier and The Crying Game 's Stephen Rea all have nothing to do, and appear flat-out lost.

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9 'Bless the Child' (2000)

Rotten tomatoes score: 4%.

None of this is on Kim Basinger . Just three short years after the icon and oft-brilliant actress won an Academy Award for a resplendent turn in L.A Confidential , Basinger appeared in this hot mess about child abduction, devil worshipers, and terrible special effects. It leans most heavily into the latter.

Bless The Child emerged from a millennium-themed era where movies studios churned out uninspired end-of-the-world stuff constantly. You'll remember Bless the Child about as well as you remember End of Days. Don't remember that one, or at least had to be reminded of it? Exactly. Nothing about Bless the Child stands out, except maybe just how generic it is.

Bless the Child

8 'the haunting of molly hartley' (2008), rotten tomatoes score: 2%.

Featuring stiff acting and, regrettably, a forgettable premise, the supernatural horror film The Haunting of Molly Hartley is about a young woman's family's pact with Satan, romantic rivalries, and actors who definitely aren't teens playing teens who like to party. Despite its critical failure, it was a mild commercial success.

Long before roles in films like Thank You For Your Service , Cyrano , and Swallow garnered the talented actress critical acclaim, Haley Bennett starred in this oh-so-aughts, punishingly lame PG-13 horror flick opposite hunky Chace Crawford , the lone draw at the time whose star was on the rise thanks to Gossip Girl . The Haunting of Molly Hartley looks shot for TV, and it's about as scary as a toothpaste commercial . This is a "horror" movie aimed at tweens.

The Haunting of Molly Hartley

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7 'Alone in the Dark' (2005)

Rotten tomatoes score: 1%.

Starring Christian Slater in the lead role, Alone in the Dark is an action horror sci-fi that follows a paranormal investigator who uncovers a long-lost tribe called the Abskani. After discovering that they worshiped demons and these evil creatures are now attempting to break loose on the face of the earth, Edward must run against time to stop them with the help of archeologist Aline Cedrac ( Tara Reid ).

Uwe Boll's $20 million-budgeted (that seems modest, but the movie looks way cheaper) video-game adaptation is often ranked among the worst films of all time, a standout among the filmmaker's less-than-critically-adored pantheon. Slater and Reid have negative chemistry, and the action scenes are stunningly inept. Alone in the Dark is astonishingly lacking , so it's no wonder why it is often considered one of the worst horror movies of all time.

Alone in the Dark

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6 'Beneath the Darkness' (2011)

Rotten tomatoes score: 0%.

In addition to having about as generic a horror title as one can fathom, the Texas-set Beneath the Darkness stars Dennis Quaid , Tony Oller , and Aimee Teegarden in a derivative teen thriller plot about a murder and a cover-up. Furthermore, probably due to its unengaging premise that leaves out much to be desired, this 2011 flick was also a box office flop, earning a total of $23,998 all over the globe.

Though it aims for a similar tone, Beneath the Darkness is so vanilla and unremarkable it makes I Know What You Did Last Summer look like a masterpiece by comparison. Unfortunately, Martin Guigui 's R-rated debut falls several stories short of expectations and inevitably takes a place on this list.

Beneath the Darkness

5 'homecoming' (2009).

In Homecoming , Mischa Barton steps into the shoes of the stereotypical jealous ex-girlfriend who seeks vengeance after her former bae ( Matt Long ) returns to their hometown with a new girlfriend ( Jessica Stroup ). While poorly received by critics worldwide, though, Homecoming was somewhat of a box office success, grossing $8.5 million against a $1.5 million budget.

There have only been about a billion Fatal Attraction and Misery knockoffs (this is a little bit of both), but arguably none as instantly forgettable as this Morgan J. Freeman (not the Oscar-winning actor) film . Critics dog-piled on Homecoming for wall-to-wall clichés, and a lack of entertainment value. It's rare, though not unheard of, for a movie with subject matter like this to be genuinely good art. To not even be good nonsense is unforgivable.

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4 'The Disappointments Room' (2016)

But seriously, who ok'd this title? What's next, a horror movie called The Underwhelming Films Bunker ? Kate Beckinsale is usually brilliant (this movie was released the same year as Love & Friendship , perhaps her best work to date), but she appears to be sleepwalking through this supernatural thriller movie (that is thrill-free) about a Brooklyn couple who discover a weird room in their new country house. And who could blame her?

The Disappointments Room was released in the wake of Relativity folding. Surely much of the talent involved would have rather it never saw the light of day. Director D.J. Caruso has made a crackling horror film in 2007's Disturbia , but The Disappointments Room practically evaporates as you watch it — like its title suggests, audiences really are in for a disappointment .

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3 'Cabin Fever' (2016)

Why, oh why is this film? An aggressively unnecessary remake of Eli Roth 's 2002 original (which rests at a far more palatable 62% on the Tomatometer ), Cabin Fever 2.0 simply retells the original story: it centers around a group of five college friends who succumb to an infectious, flesh-eating disease while staying at a remote cabin, only without the weird energy and humor that made the original movie what it was.

Roth surely has his detractors, but the Cabin Fever remake goes a long way in making Roth look good . In addition to not doing anything different from its source material, it is a gross horror movie without personality and a depressing experience; not in the cathartic way audiences sometimes want from a horror movie. It's really just a bummer.

Cabin Fever

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2 'Jaws: The Revenge' (1987)

How low can you go is the name of the game in this abominable third sequel to arguably the best suspense film ever made. The fourth and final film in the Jaws franchise shifted the focus to now-widowed Ellen Brody ( Loirrane Gary ) and her genuine belief that a white shark is seeking revenge on her family, especially when it kills her youngest son and then follows her to the Bahamas.

The Revenge is mostly unwatchably boring and unpleasurable, but there are so-bad-it's-good assets , like the roaring shark (yes, a roaring shark). Michael Caine famously missed an Oscars ceremony where he won for Hannah and Her Sisters to film Jaws: The Revenge. Film critic Roger Ebert famously knocked him for it.

Jaws: The Revenge

1 'one missed call' (2008).

The Ring starring Naomi Watts was a box-office leviathan and the beginning of a J-horror remake influx in Hollywood. The worst of these mostly terrible pale imitators of the solid Ring is this lame thriller about cursed voicemails. Gore Verbinski 's phenomenally successful retelling of Ringu accumulated a handful of mixed-to-negative critical notices (they were mostly positive).

Compared to One Missed Call , which centers around Beth Raymond ( Shannyn Sossamon ) as she witnesses the deaths of two friends who hear horrifying messages through the phone, that film is Psycho , an untouchable peak of the horror genre. According to Rotten Tomatoes (based on 80 reviews), this insult to Takashi Miike's well-received original is the worst horror movie, ever .

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NEXT: The Best Horror Movies of All Time, Ranked

'Monster' Review: Rako Prijanto's gripping flick relies on visuals, leaving viewers both engrossed and baffled

Contains spoilers for 'Monster'

JAKARTA, INDONESIA: The Indonesian thriller film ' Monster ,' directed by Rako Prijanto, portrays the terrifying experience of being abducted and highlights the horrors that can arise.

The film, which is available to stream on Netflix , delves into the genre of silent horror in an effort to create tension and terror without using words.

The film centers on the abduction of two friends, Alana (Anantya Kirana) and Rabin (Sultan Hamonangan), and their terrifying struggle to survive against their kidnapper, an enigmatic 'Monster.'

The film attempts to combine aspects of mystery, suspense, and horror into a seamless and compelling story but the execution falls far short of expectations, making for a film that is engaging but frequently unbelievable.

'Monster' relies heavily on visual storytelling

Rako Prijanto, as a director, made a risky decision by leaving out dialogue in the film, which has a high-risk factor as the movie tells its story primarily through visuals.

The visuals weave a compelling narrative where each character has their trait such as Alana's wide eyes convey her terror; Rabin's whimpers reveal her helplessness.

This emphasis on visuals gives the audience an unfiltered experience that leaves much to the imagination and is up to interpretation; this is both the movie's greatest asset and as well as its weakness.

It produces a powerful and engrossing environment, but it also leaves the plot seeming unfinished and often confusing.

Writers face the challenge of weaving dialogue-free Narrative in 'Monster'

The film's screenplay, written by Alim Sudio, Justin Powell, and David Charbonier, skillfully evokes a sense of urgency and terror.

Keeping the story interesting and cohesive without dialogue is one of the writers' biggest obstacles. Even while they are successful in producing an atmospheric and suspenseful thriller, there are several scenes where the absence of spoken dialogue may leave some viewers seeking more explanation.

Although the decision to forgo conversation is bold and creative, it also demands greater audience participation in the storytelling process.

Actors' performances elevate 'Monster' in the absence of dialogue 

The actors in the film deserve special recognition for their performances, which were instrumental in enhancing the film.

Despite the lack of dialogue, they were tasked with conveying the emotional and psychological depth of the story solely through their bodies and facial expressions.

In her portrayal of the young Alana, Anantya Kirana exudes resilience and innocence. She conveys the fear and despair of a youngster in danger with her expressive eyes and body language. She is quite adept at maintaining a compelling screen presence despite her age.

Sultan Hamonangan's portrayal of Rabin gives the movie even more raw emotional depth. His portrayal of fear and helplessness feels authentic. Hamonangan's depiction of helplessness is depicted skilfully through nuanced gestures and facial expressions that draw the viewer into the narrative and give the impression that Rabin's situation is urgent and genuine. 

Marsha Timothy's portrayal of Murni also deserves applause as she genuinely lends a chilling element to the character arcs. Her body language and facial expressions convey a sense of unpredictability and menace throughout her performance. 

All things considered, the film offers a unique cinematic experience akin to ' The Quiet Place ,' crafting a suspenseful environment by employing the visuals to instill feelings of terror and urgency.

In the end, 'Monster' provides a unique cinematic experience that may be captivating for viewers who love non-traditional filmmaking methods.

This film merits consideration to ensure that more experiments of this nature continue to be made and that our cinematic experiences aren't limited to the conventional.

'Monster' trailer

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One Of The Most Exciting Horror Movies Of The Year Will Be Streaming For Free This Week

Horror fans tend to treat their favorite movies — no matter how schlocky or cheaply-made — as sacred cows, which puts an immeasurable amount of pressure on anyone who dares to remake, reboot, or legacyquel a beloved title. And yet, director Danishka Esterhazy handled that pressure with ease for her fantastic meta-remake of "Slumber Party Massacre," and quickly solidified herself as one of the most exciting new voices in horror.

Esterhazy had already earned a great deal of goodwill with her twisted take on "The Banana Splits Movie," and well-versed aficionados likely first learned of her work with the gripping sci-fi dystopian flick "Level 16," about a prison-like boarding school for girls harboring a demented secret. And luckily for fans of all things scary and slasher, Esterhazy has a new film coming to the Tubi streaming service on May 17, 2024, called "Killer Body Count." That's right, in less than three days from the time this article goes live, you'll be able to enjoy a new slasher film from one of the most exciting directors working in the genre for free .

Tubi has been proving to be a formidable force in the streaming wars  and has been cranking out new horror flicks at a rapid pace. They produced the 2022 remake of "Terror Train," a horror-comedy film called "Slay" about drag queens fighting vampires, and the survival horror flick "Lowlifes." Esterhazy is a great addition to their line-up and based on the trailer for "Killer Body Count," has made an exciting, fresh, and fun slasher movie that might be the perfect choice for your next at-home watch party with friends.

Sex and death in Killer Body Count

"Killer Body Count" centers on a young woman named Cami who is mistaken for a sex addict by her religiously devout father, who sends her off to an isolated rehabilitation center in the wilderness for at-risk youth. But shortly after arrival, a killer in a devil mask starts hunting Cami and the other patients at the center, they're thrust into a fight for their lives. If this sounds like the Blumhouse flick "They/Them" but set at a different type of camp for troubled teens, take solace in knowing that based on the trailer, not all of the teens here are straight so there's certainly some great queer horror themes to explore as well. Cassiel Eatock-Winnik stars as Cami George, and is joined by Savana Tardieu as Wyatt, Khosi Ngema as Ali, N'kone Mametja as Mia, Alex McGregor as Tawny, Bjorn Steinbach as Eugene, and Jessie Diepeveen as Bree.

While Esterhazy served as director, the screenplay comes from Jessica Landry, who has also penned made-for-TV thrillers like "A Podcast to Die For," "Deadly Mom Retreat," and "Cheerleader Abduction." Perhaps what is most exciting is how unapologetically this film is courting Gen Z audiences, with jokes about only knowing how a rotary phone works because they saw it on "Stranger Things," and even the wordplay of the title. For those unaware, "body count" is slang for how many sexual partners a person has had, so the double entendre is a thing of beauty.

"Killer Body Count" arrives on Tubi on Friday, May 17, 2024.

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Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara

A Jewish boy is kidnapped and converted to Catholicism in 1858. A Jewish boy is kidnapped and converted to Catholicism in 1858. A Jewish boy is kidnapped and converted to Catholicism in 1858.

• Marco Bellocchio
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• 16 wins & 16 nominations

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• Edgardo Mortara da bambino
• Edgardo Mortara da ragazzo

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• Riccardo Mortara

• Giudice Carboni
• Anna Morisi

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• Trivia Steven Spielberg was intending to direct a version of this story around 2016. He even was looking at casting the young boy's role though open auditions from Jewish Schools in Europe and America. Although he had cast Mark Rylance as Pope Pius IX and Oscar Isaac as the older Edgardo Mortara, Spielberg's inability to find the right child actor led to the project becoming stalled.

Salomone Mortara : What were we supposed to do?

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• Oct 14, 2023
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• May 24, 2024 (United States)
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Teri Hatcher To Lead Lifetime Movie About Woman Abducted By Possible BTK Killer 

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EXCLUSIVE: Teri Hatcher  ( Desperate Housewives ) is set to star in the new Lifetime movie The Killer Inside: The Ruth Finley Story alongside  Tahmoh Penikett  ( Battlestar Galactica ) premiering on Saturday, June 29.

The upcoming psychological drama tells the true story of an unassuming housewife who becomes the target of a mysterious stalker whom she and the cops fear is the BTK Slayer. 

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Amidst the frenzy of the police’s pursuit of BTK, Ruth is abducted, sending shockwaves through the community. Yet her sudden reappearance shortly after the kidnapping leaves investigators baffled and scrambling for answers. As suspicion mounts and new evidence comes to light, the authorities entertain the unsettling notion that the perpetrator may be someone intimately connected to Ruth.

The movie is produced by Housewife Productions Inc. for Lifetime. Navid Soofi produces with Tim Johnson and Stacy Mandelberg serving as executive producers and Lisa Alford as co-executive producer. The film is written by Katie Gruel and directed by Greg Beeman.

Hatcher is represented by UTA and Authentic Talent and Literary Management.

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Imagining a U.S. in which every Latin American has been deported

Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s “American Abductions” is one of the most affecting and inventive novels in recent memory.

Mauro Javier Cárdenas hates trauma. Or at least, as the Ecuadorian novelist said in a 2021 interview , he hates “the automatisms of trauma,” those unconscious recitations and reenactments of the ordeals that, it is often alleged, shape everything about us as people.

Yet his third novel, “ American Abductions ,” is quite literally organized around trauma: In the near future, America’s “Racist in Chief,” supported by an overwhelming number of “Pale Americans,” has deported all Latin Americans from the country. Citizens are denaturalized, families separated, children disappeared into the adoption system. So how to write about the subject without reducing it to the banal via the repetition of rote narratives? How to depict these atrocities and also to say, as one adoptee does late in the novel, “I am not your victim”?

The result is one of the most affecting and inventive English-language novels in recent memory, a playful and experimental narrative about narratives in which the question of who is telling the story — and how they go about doing it — proves the real subject. “Abductions” centers on Ada and Eva, sisters whose Colombian father, Antonio, was “kidnapped” while driving them to school in San Francisco. Such kidnappings — Cárdenas purposefully deploys the word — are carried out by “Abductors,” members of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement-like agency who wear “fake police vests” and carry out their duties seemingly at random.

In America, Antonio worked as a senior data analyst to support his Czech wife and their two daughters. But after his denaturalization and deportation, he remakes himself as “a so-called novelist,” traveling the world to interview victims of the abduction program. Among them is Elsi, whose nephew died in American custody; Auxilio, whose daughter Aura was kidnapped and adopted into an American family; and a young man in a Colombian mental hospital who has dissociated from his identity in an attempt to suppress the fact that his father killed himself (or was killed by the Abductors) after they crossed the border. He asks Antonio to call him “the replica of the replica of Roberto Bolaño.”

This should give you a sense of Cárdenas’s literary ambitions. Most of the novel’s 39 chapters are told from one of these perspectives, and each is presented as a single, pages-long sentence, touching on biography, literature, popular music, programing languages, social media and science fiction along the way. Don’t let it intimidate you; Cárdenas’s protracted sentences are like rivers, not mountains. They meander easily from reference to reference (the Steve Miller Band, W.G. Sebald, “The Five Obstructions” and Lionel Richie all make appearances) and cut plainly across different time frames, and they allow for the natural, halting, even jokey flow of thought and conversation, dropping the reader deep into each well of pain.

These narratives all circle around the injury of separation — of parent from child, nephew from aunt — but by presenting them in this fashion, Cárdenas strives to break free from traumatic clichés. “What will happen to my memories of Aura,” asks Auxilio, “if they become part of a ritual of confession?” They become all too familiar, easy for a reader to gloss over and forget. But each injury is done to a particular person and must be lived within its specificity.

Yet these narratives exist in a wider context, a history that unites victims, perpetrators and bystanders. Ada’s video of Antonio’s abduction goes viral, turning their family into a target of online sympathy and harassment, and giving their story an afterlife that survives even their father. Antonio’s project aims to record the experiences of as many deportees as will meet with him. The abduction program is enabled by a vast surveillance system, a set of algorithms, data centers and legally compliant technology companies that hoover up the images, videos and phone calls of Latin Americans, both in the United States and beyond its borders.

Cárdenas is especially at home in this computational mode. “The only truly experimental literature of the 21st century,” he has observed, “is that which plays with algorithms,” and “Abductions” explores both the terrors and promises of technology like few other recent novels. The same programs that passively decide which Americans are to be deported also surveil their workplace productivity, preventing one character from watching a video of herself as a 17-month-old, separated from and reunited with her mother, while at work. Antonio often thinks in the if/then/therefore logic of computers, and he codes for his daughters a program that spits out quotes from the surrealist writer Leonora Carrington, a means of speaking with them, even after his death. And in one bravura passage, Auxilio considers calling the United States. If her voice is captured by the American surveillance algorithm, she reasons, it will be stored in a data center alongside any recordings of her lost daughter’s voice, and they will be reunited, if only in the cloud.

After he has a heart attack, Antonio’s files fall to his daughters, who continue on with his project, and the novel’s form is revealed. No simple narrative of injury and restoration, “American Abductions” threads together a vast psychic web — a shared imaginary, shaped by both grand policy and petty malice, a pain that seeps into our collective unconscious, haunting even our dreams. If you want to use the word, it goes beyond trauma and into something deeper, a connection uniting the stories of a vast collective, like the surveillance centers full of ambiently collected data, or the message boards on which the survivors of the abduction program meet, and commiserate, and attempt to live on.

Robert Rubsam is a writer and critic whose work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, the Baffler and the Nation.

American Abductions

By Mauro Javier Cárdenas

Dalkey Archive. 229 pp. $17.95

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‘dark matter’ review: joel edgerton and jennifer connelly in apple tv+’s relentlessly glum take on ‘it’s a wonderful life’.

Blake Crouch adapts his own novel in this nine-part dimension-spanning sci-fi drama also featuring Alice Braga and Jimmi Simpson.

By Daniel Fienberg

Daniel Fienberg

Chief Television Critic

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Have you ever watched It’s a Wonderful Life and wished that Frank Capra had paused to show us Clarence the Angel explaining to George Bailey how he was able to present him with the experience of a world in which he was never born?

Dark Matter

Related stories, apple tv+ cancels 'constellation' after single season, joel edgerton on failing 'guardians of the galaxy' audition: "the world is a much better place".

Joel Edgerton plays Jason Dessen, a Chicago-area physicist living an unremarkably content life with his wife Daniela ( Jennifer Connelly ), an art gallery something-or-other, and teenage son Charlie (Oakes Fegley). At one point, Jason had dreams of making big discoveries and winning big prizes, but in prioritizing his family, he chose a life that has him giving lackluster lectures to uninterested college students. In familiar TV/movie fashion, we happen to meet Jason as he’s trying to explain Schrödinger’s Cat and the paradox of “superposition” to a class; he’ll spend much of the rest of the series repeatedly trying to explain the same to us.

Jason’s friend Ryan (Jimmi Simpson), who does other science-guy stuff, has won some big science-y prize and Jason is semi-secretly resentful — something about the path not taken and the life not lived.

It might sound as if that summary, as well as the trailer for Dark Matter , is spoiler-y. It isn’t. One or two unexpected things happen in Dark Matter , but what I described was the premise, and the show is generally without twists. Also, it might sound from that summary like Dark Matter is a confusing show. It isn’t. All confusion in the story comes either from the characters on the screen functioning five steps behind the audience or from intentional decisions by the directors/editors to present simple things in confusing ways as an odd substitute for presenting confusing things in entertaining ways. This is not Counterpart , the short-lived Starz drama about the intersection between parallel worlds that may have been too smart for its own good. It’s more like Discounterpart .

The impressive line that Capra walks in It’s a Wonderful Life allows us to simultaneously see all the failures in George Bailey’s life and yet still know, even without Clarence telling him or us, that it was a good life. It’s both at once! Talk about superposition. Dark Matter wants to do something similar, which you’d probably understand even without the multiple winking nods and then the not-so-winking nod of a character running through a snowy street and past a movie theater showing It’s a Wonderful Life . Yet it fails.

It’s exactly the wrong way to start a series, because it puts the immediate emphasis on shadowy mystery, and we only then witness Jason1’s life and it, too, is muted. If the series doesn’t establish Jason1’s life in a way that makes us understand why he’s eager to get back to it, we’re only invested in his journey in a perfunctory way. We spend nine episodes watching Jason1 attempt to get his life back because cosmic disorder is bad, not because there’s any warmth to what we’re introduced to. Over the three episodes Verbruggen directs, there are almost no smiles, no jokes, no colors in the cinematography, nothing Capra-esque.

This is clearly what Crouch, creator and showrunner, wanted in his take on his own novel, because even after subsequent directors take over for Verbruggen, a downcast affect reigns. Multiple episodes occur in a conceptual realm known as The Corridor, a manifestation of the multiverse, a concept that Jason1 keeps needing to talk Amanda through, as if the Marvel Cinematic Universe didn’t exist in Jason2’s universe.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an actor taking less visible pleasure in a project that lets him play two different versions of the same character than Edgerton here. Edgerton keeps both men similarly intense and mumbly, so much that it’s nearly a thought experiment in anti-entertainment. If Jason1 didn’t acquire some facial wounds as part of the initial abduction there would be no distinguishing between the characters 95 percent of the time. The other five percent of the time, Jason2 has a “hard edge” so obvious that you want to shout at Daniela and Charlie for missing it.

Although she gets to try on several different hair styles — Jason isn’t the only character to exist in multiple realities — there’s little in Daniela to require an actress of Connelly’s stature. She has one meltdown in a later episode that’s so earned and so well-executed that I wished she’d been given more. Still, she has a bounty compared to Braga, who, for her part, at least gets a small mid-season arc, compared to several key characters from Jason2’s world so comically underdeveloped that their “storylines” are resolved in a closing montage after they’ve already been gone for three or four full hours. A show with this many actors playing this many alternate identities should be a smorgasbord of acting opportunities. Dark Matter is not.

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