Last week a bidding war raged over Abduction, a script by Shawn Christensen with the increasingly sought-after 18-year-old Taylor Lautner attached to star and produce. Lionsgate ultimately acquired the rights for nearly $1 million and hopes to find a director in time to shoot this July. The script may go through a final polish in the next few months, but first here’s a look at what caused the studio frenzy:

An opening scene set in 1994 centers on an unknown woman gasping for air as poisonous gas floods her hotel room. Two men in masks interrogate her about the whereabouts of “The Locust.” She refuses to reveal his location and soon takes her last breath while the men watch.

Flash forward to the present as the first act establishes Nathan (Lautner), a “tee-shirt and jeans type” and an ordinary high school teenager, partying with friends, drinking underage, and scoping out girls. But he only has eyes for his next door neighbor Karen, a cheerleader in the vein of seemingly unattainable Transformers hottie Megan Fox. Nathan’s best friend Gilly, a conveniently tech savvy character, invites him to paintball and Nathan foreshadows, “Gunning down people is not my idea of a good time.”

With this stock setup comes the usual product placement. Nathan blasts away enemies in a game of Halo, iPod buds hang from his ears while he works on the roof, an iPhone records his fall into the bushes below, and the YouTube clip humiliates him with his peers. There’s no mistaking which generation these teenage characters belong to.

A school project and a few locker-side chats eventually pair Nathan and Karen on a presentation about kidnapped children. While researching on a missing-persons website, he finds a picture of himself (!) and suddenly Nathan isn’t sure who he is or who has been raising him for almost eighteen years.

We learn his “parents,” Kevin and Mara, have been hiding and protecting him from an unknown threat most of his life. That is, until a couple of shady gunmen show up at their house and start blasting away. A narrow escape puts Nathan and Karen on the run from government agents and double agents with connections to “The Locust,” Russian/Ukranian KGB operatives with a score to settle, a bounty hunter tracking him down, and the police who believe he’s response for the violence.

Nathan’s unknown origins fit into a recurring theme of secret identities that drive an amped up action adventure full of characters who aren’t who they say (or think) they are. “Who are you!” Nathan screams at a dying assailant. “Perhaps you should ask that question of yourself,” the mysterious man gasps in his last breaths.

Encounters at Nathan’s house, a train sequence, and a fight atop the Canadian National (CN) Tower should give Lautner more chances to try his own stunts. It has become hackneyed to compare an action style to Jason Bourne, but the hand-to-hand combat and chase sequences clearly recall the spy series’ influence. However, strange phone calls guiding him to safety are more reminiscent of Shia LaBeouf’s Eagle Eye and there are plot similarities to the recently shelved series Wanted.

After the initial setup, the brisk script is lined with action set pieces, but its overall tone and simplicity skew towards a younger, PG-13 audience. Of course, Lautner fans will be happy to know his character removes his shirt at least once. The script may not be worthy of a million dollar payday, but its franchise potential certainly might.

SOURCE: News In Film