Runtime:
106 minutes
Directed by: Poor John Singleton
Starring:
A piece of cardboard... I mean, Taylor Lautner, Phil Collins'
daughter Lily, Alfred Molina, Michael Nyqvist, Sigourney Weaver
From:
Lionsgate
Yes,
I have who knows how many hundreds of movies that I should
watch-including those that I own in person-and yet I picked out
something that I was almost positive I thought would be crap.
Sometimes, I do enjoy watching something as I figure I will laugh at
it and be amused due to its incompetence. This was one of those
cases; even before it came out September of '11 there were plenty of
people who made fun of it due to its premise and also due to who the
lead was... the third wheel in the atrocious Twilight series of
movies, an actor who I've never heard anything good about in terms of
performance. I have never seen any of the tales of Edward Cullen and
Bella Swan (I'd rather drink several bottles of nail polish remover
in a row) so I figured this would be the “best” way for me to
check out his “acting”.
The
plot, stolen from Rotten Tomatoes (but edited): “For
as long as he can remember, Nathan Harper (Taylor Lautner) has had
the uneasy feeling that he's living someone else's life. When he
stumbles upon an image of himself as a little boy on a missing
persons website, all of Nathan's darkest fears come true: he realizes
his parents are not his own and his life is a lie, carefully
fabricated to hide something more mysterious and dangerous than he
could have ever imagined. Just as he begins to piece together his
true identity, Nathan is targeted by a
team of trained killers, forcing him on the run with the only person
he can trust, his neighbor, Karen (Lily Collins).”
A
great modern version of a classic 70's paranoid thriller, this is not... not by a country mile. What the story is all about is goofy and dumb, but it isn't the worst thing in the world. The way it's presented, though, is not good; things really aren't explained until the very end, so it's just a bunch of random crap happening for a long time. What I've heard is true, Taylor Lautner is a pretty terrible actor. His character was also an asstagonist. At least the movie tried to reach their demographic early on by having Wolf Boy from the Twilight films appear shirtless. Lily Collins isn't great either but she was a newbie at this point and was still better than Mr. Lautner; plus, she isn't bad to look at either... but the story, yeah it ends up being nonsensical with a lot of technology used that seems to be improbable at best, even if used by the likes of the CIA. Yes, the CIA is involved, along with a climax at a Pittsburgh Pirates baseball game, back when that team was still pretty crappy.
The movie isn't really worth seeing, not even for the unintentional humor, such as the villain threatening the hero by saying he'll kill his real-life friends AND the ones on Facebook (really) and a preposterous scene where... well, I'll just blurt it out... some bad guys break into what turns out to be the foster home of Nathan and they kill his parents. Nathan fights back and a villain who is still alive reveals that "there's a bomb in the oven"... and he was right! A bomb that looks like it was ordered by Wile E. Coyote is in there and the bomb blows the house the hell up. The way it's presented, it makes no sense for there to be a bomb at all, unless the villains put a self-imposed time limit on themselves when they should have known that the foster parents had fighting skills and it wouldn't be an easy operation.
Stupid, this movie is. Don't watch it! At least the famous faces (there's also Maria Bello, Jason Issacs, and Dermot Mulroney) and the director likely received nice paychecks to appear in this dreck, but it doesn't mean you have to watch it.
I'll be back tomorrow afternoon.
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