Joyful Noise, a squeaky-clean pop-gospel fairy tale featuring Dolly Parton and Queen Latifah in canned catfights, reflects the inspiration of Glee and God, in that order. The Glee side, at least in my book, doesn’t exactly amount to a recommendation, but it does mean that the movie’s musical numbers are catchy and rollicking and, in their bright sunshiny way, rather soulful. In the small town of Pacashau, Ga., times are hard — every other storefront is empty — but the Divinity Church choir has lifted local spirits by rising to become a semifinalist in the National Joyful Noise Competition. Can these spunky vocalists go the distance?

Not until they learn to work together in harmony. Which means that Vi Rose Hill (Latifah), the choir’s new director, has to stop feuding with G.G. Sparrow (Parton), widow of the former choir leader, over the direction of the group’s music. Vi Rose, feisty and smart-mouthed, favors tradition, while G.G., whose grandson Randy (Jeremy Jordan) is the new songbird on the block, is out to shake things up. Parton now looks like a Spitting Image puppet (the film makes plastic-surgery jokes about her so that we don’t have to), but she still has a way with lines like ”I’d call you stubborn, but that’d be an insult to mules!”

Joyful Noise also finds room for a teenager with Asperger’s syndrome (Dexter Darden) who loves one-hit-wonder songs (but can he learn to love himself?), as well as a romance between Randy and Vi Rose’s daughter Olivia (Keke Palmer). These two are pretty — and as bland as balsa wood. But each time the innocuousness starts to get to you, you’re woken up by Randy and Olivia’s swooning ”Maybe I’m Amazed” duet, or a kid-choir rendition of Billy Preston’s ”That’s the Way God Planned It,” or the final ”I Want to Take You Higher” blowout. These numbers create a deep river of feeling, even when stuck in the shallow banks of a movie like this one.

Our Verdict: You’ll find yourself rolling your eyes, but you’ll have more fun if you try to roll them in time with the rollicking numbers.

Given how low our expectations are — or should be — for January thrillers, it’s always a pleasurable surprise to encounter one that approximates ingenuity, or even a hint of wit. So I appreciated the showpiece sequence in Contraband in which a trim, lightning-quick Mark Wahlberg, cast as a retired smuggler who’s drawn back into the game, attempts to score a pile of counterfeit bills in the tin-shack streets of Panama City.

Wahlberg’s Chris Farrady heads down to Panama, on a merchant vessel run by a corrupt captain (J.K. Simmons), to pay off a debt that his screwup brother-in-law (Caleb Landry Jones) owes to a drug lord (Giovanni Ribisi, giving his tattooed, greasy-sideburned version of a bad Marlon Brando performance). When Chris first sees the funny money that he’s arranged to buy, he knows that something’s off — so he calls for a bottle of iodine, a drop of which reveals that the bills aren’t up to scratch, because they weren’t printed on starch-free paper stock. (You’ve got to love the detail of the expertise.) He then locates the gangster with the real-deal fake bills, played by Diego Luna, the pensive costar of Y Tu Mamá También and Milk, exchanging his sensitive aura for a gruff, Che Guevara-as-sociopath makeover, which he inhabits as if born to it.

The gangster is a chum of Chris’ from his smuggling days, so everything seems good — until Chris discovers that his satchel of cash has been stolen, at which point he’s forced to assist in an armored-truck robbery that might have come right out of The Town. As Luna’s hooligans pull a paint-spattered canvas out of the truck, cutting it out of its frame, we see only a corner, which is just enough to reveal that it’s a Jackson Pollock (the painter’s name isn’t mentioned). Then they hide the canvas in plain sight by using it as a back-of-the-van cover rag! It’s hilarious that a work of art worth $140 million keeps getting ignored by brutes who simply don’t recognize what it is.

If all of Contraband were that clever, it might have been an honorable entry in the action-heist genre. As it is, the movie, directed by Iceland’s Baltasar Kormákur (it’s a remake of the 2008 Icelandic thriller Reykjavik-Rotterdam, which Kormákur produced), sandwiches its good bits into a conventional macho pressure cooker. Kate Beckinsale, as Wahlberg’s wife, keeps getting terrorized by Ribisi and others, including a weaselly Ben Foster. The woman-in-peril stuff is second-rate, giving off a whiff of exploitation. And the plot hangs on one too many blink-and-you’ll-miss-’em coincidences. Yet Contraband, while often grungy and far-fetched, does keep you watching. And in January, that’s recommendation enough.

Our Verdict: Contraband generally succeeds well at what it wants to do. It is a gritty, exciting film, with some cool action sequences and a cathartic conclusion.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo gives off a ripely kinky, menacing glow. It opens with psychedelic music-video credits, scored to Karen O’s caterwauling cover of Led Zeppelin’s ”Immigrant Song,” that set a mood of evil dipped in black rubber. That fanfare lets you know that the movie is going to have a sensuality and danger that the 2009 Swedish screen version, dutifully effective as it was, did not. Directed by the high-grunge master David Fincher (Zodiac, Se7en, The Social Network), the new Girl With the Dragon Tattoo sticks close to the spirit and most of the details of Stieg Larsson’s Swedish serial-killer novel, in which an officially disgraced left-wing journalist, Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig), is hired to investigate a homicide that has haunted an aristocratic family for 40 years. Larsson’s plot is nothing more (or less) than a clever conventional whodunit festooned with glimmers of depravity. Fincher, however, teases out the full mythological grandeur of the material. He’s not just a great director — he’s an artist with the eyes of a voyeur, and he has made The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo into an electrifying movie by turning the audience into addicts of the forbidden, looking for the sick and twisted things we can’t see.

As Lisbeth Salander, the sullen 24-year-old waif hacker who’s the story’s spectacularly outlandish heroine, Rooney Mara is a revelation. She sports the spiky black plumage of a punkette peacock, with oversize earrings tightened onto her lobes like gears, pale-gray skin set off by barely perceptible eyebrows, choppy bangs, and piercings she wears like scars. Even when Lisbeth is standing still, her whole look is really an act of violence, an assault against decorum. It’s her way of fighting to be noticed, with a suppressed scream that says, ”Look at me — and stay away!” She’s like Clarice Starling crossed with Joan of Arc crossed with a homeless, fingerless-gloved teen sociopath. Lisbeth, who set her father on fire and has been in and out of a mental ward, is placed in the ”care” of a civil-servant parole officer named Bjurman (Yorick van Wageningen), a bourgeois pig who not only treats her like a piece of meat but is supremely smug about his belief that he can get away with it. His assaults against Lisbeth rouse us to her side, culminating in an all-out violation that Fincher stages with naked horror. When Lisbeth returns to seek vengeance, armed with scurrilous video and a tattoo gun, she’s no trumped-up action heroine; she’s operating out of hell-bent instinct. Mara acts with a quiet power — a rage chilled into silence — that is almost ghostly.

Lisbeth works for a security firm that looks the other way at her laptop invasions of e-mails and corporate documents, and eventually, she teams up with Blomkvist. For a long time, though, the movie cross-cuts between the two of them. It follows Blomkvist as he’s hired by Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), the elder statesman of the Vanger clan, to come to the family’s frozen, wintry island and investigate the murder, back in 1966, of Harriet, a 16-year-old member of the family who disappeared the same day as a fateful car crash on the mainland bridge. Daniel Craig, edgy and alert, is at his saturnine best — though I do wish he’d tried for a Swedish accent, to give himself a slightly different persona than we’re used to.

When Lisbeth comes along and joins him as a researcher, the two have a wary, downbeat chemistry that is so unusual it’s transfixing. Lisbeth sees the case as a mirror of her own victimization. She’s fighting the men who fear and loathe women. Even her superstar hacking is presented as a feminine skill: a girl’s stealth entrée into the male power structure. At the same time, when she strips off her clothes and leaps into bed with the more-than-slightly-shocked Blomkvist, who has an on-and-off journalist girlfriend (Robin Wright) of his own, what Mara’s performance captures — and what Noomi Rapace’s, for all her skill in the Swedish version, didn’t — is that Lisbeth’s erotic ferocity is a product of the detached, cyber-porn era. She can jump Blomkvist’s bones because she compartmentalizes her desires.

The investigation hinges on old photographs from the day of Harriet’s disappearance, and Fincher manipulates these enigmatic images with a frame-by-frame dexterity worthy of the Zapruder film. Slowly, we watch as the victim watches the killer come into view. Who in the Vanger clan committed an unspeakable crime? The family is presented as a parade of rogues, deviants, misanthropes, and even Nazis, but really, this stuff all seems a bit musty. What’s fresh, in its ambiguity, is the creepy-elegant performance of Stellan Skarsgård. He plays Harriet’s brother, not to mention the Vanger descendant with by far the most spectacular kitchen — which, in a film this suspicious of old money, certainly targets him as someone to be watched. Many, of course, will go into the movie knowing just what happens. But even if you do, Fincher uses the resolution of the film’s crimes as a chance to stage a torture scene that is memorable in its sick-puppy majesty. I will say outright that the closest Fincher comes to genius in this film is his use of Enya’s “Orinoco Flow (Sail Away)” as a background aria of jaunty dread.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is a brilliant franchise movie, but since it is a franchise movie, Fincher obviously felt duty-bound to retain the book’s somewhat lumpy structure. Once the mystery is solved, there’s still a major chunk to go of thorny financial-logistical gamesmanship. It’s not that this stuff is boring, but it does seem like an anticlimax. What redeems it, dramatically, is that it’s all framed through the eyes of Lisbeth, and Mara, without going soft, draws us to a quality deep inside her beyond her ability to solve a crime. By the end, Lisbeth can feel something, maybe a touch of tenderness. Even as she breathes fire.

Our Verdict: As he proved last year, David Fincher can make the inherently uncinematic into thrilling cinema. Fincher is the right director to make a movie where two people rifle through endless amounts of paperwork and old photos suspenseful.

Tom Cruise, as IMF agent Ethan Hunt, is trying to break into the suite that houses the skyscraper’s ­computer servers, and this is the only way he can do it without being detected from within. Brad Bird, the director of Ghost Protocol, knows all too well that the audience will be on the lookout for any tell-tale cut, any obvious digital image, anything at all that reveals that Tom Cruise isn’t really on the side of that skyscraper. And damned if we can find one! This is a sequence so ingeniously conceived and shot that even the audience doesn’t want to look down — a sequence so death-defying that it gets you laughing at your own susceptibility (especially if, like me, you happen to have a fear of heights). Shimmying up and down and around the building’s surface, with the ground looking as if it must be a mile below, Cruise becomes a fearless human bug (think Spider-Man without the superpowers). Then, just as we’re sure that our hearts couldn’t dig any deeper into our throats, one of his gloves begins to short out and lose adhesive power. Don’t you hate when that happens?

Ghost Protocol brims with scenes that are exciting and amazing at the same time; they’re brought off with such casual aplomb that they’re funny, too. Early on, Hunt and a fellow agent, the nattering tech nerd Benji (Simon Pegg), have to penetrate the archive room of the Kremlin, and they do it in captivating silence by hiding behind a scrim that projects, to the security guard, an exact image of the hallway they’re in (minus the two of them). It’s the spy equivalent of a magic trick, and that’s the spirit of the whole movie. Ghost Protocol is fast and explosive, but it’s also a supremely clever sleight-of-hand thriller. Brad Bird, the animation wizard (The Incredibles, The Iron Giant), makes the leap to live action with the kind of skill Paul Greengrass brought to the Bourne films, only Bird, showing an animator’s miraculously precise use of visual space, has a playful, screw-tightening ingenuity all his own.

After an epic explosion rocks the Kremlin, the entire IMF gets ”disavowed,” and Hunt and his team find themselves cut off, without backup. Suddenly they’re rogue agents, like an espionage version of the Ocean’s gang, only with far more important priorities. Their mission is to stop Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist, dour costar of the Swedish Girl With the Dragon Tattoo films), a lone terrorist who has stolen the Russian nuclear codes, from launching a missile and kicking off a nuclear war. All because he’s a nihilist nut who really wants to. Hunt’s team, aside from Benji (played by Pegg with impish timing), includes the terrific Paula Patton as the dangerously beautiful and ruthless Jane, and Jeremy Renner, all moody reticence, as a desk jockey named Brandt with a backstory that makes it look, for a time, like he’s Ethan’s ambiguous adversary. Together, these four execute fake seductions and underworld meetings, take parking-garage fight scenes to new heights of layer-cake suspense, and race against the clock of a nuclear countdown that’s just jittery enough to make the unthinkable credible.

It’s become easy to take Tom Cruise’s skill for granted (even his fans do), but in Ghost Protocol he has a pulsating presence, a dynamic mind-body fusion. From the moment he gets broken out of a Russian prison cell, only to argue with Benji via video feed as chaotic violence swirls all around him, Cruise energizes the film with his no-sweat bravura. He kicks ass like an Ultimate-Fighting bruiser, he races vehicles like a demon — but more than any of that, he invests every line, every situation, with the cleanly intense, fired-up concentration of an actor who means it. Powered by Cruise’s moxie, Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol proves that in a Hollywood action-ride ­culture drenched in fake adrenaline, it’s cathartic to encounter the real thing.

Our Verdict: “Mission: Impossible-Ghost Protocol” is sheer hurtling mechanism — and it’s great silly fun.

A mysterious mechanical man with the ability to write and draw holds a place of honor in Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s exquisite adaptation of Brian Selznick’s magical, award-winning children’s book The Invention of Hugo Cabret. And the author’s description of the automaton’s construction — ”A cascade of perfect movements, with hundreds of brilliantly calibrated actions” — is an equally good way to describe Scorsese’s achievement in making art that uses the most advanced of 3-D technology to sing a song of love to the movies, from the very dawn of the medium. For a lay audience, the result is a haunting, piquant melodrama about childhood dreams and yearnings, enhanced with a pleasant survey course in early film history. (It made me cry, without guilt.) For more advanced cinephiles, the result is a cabinet of wonders in which each shot, each experiment in 3-D perspective, and, indeed, each scene in the story’s progression can be linked to what we already know about Scorsese, his work, and his 
 well-known cinematic passions. A niggler might note that every element is at times
 an eensy bit too perfectly meshed and worked over. Today, I don’t feel like niggling.

Hugo is played with jolting melodramatic pathos — and the genetic blessing of bottomless, pale blue eyes — by Asa Butterfield (The Boy in the Striped Pajamas). He is a sad young orphan who keeps the clocks running in a bustling 1930s Parisian train station patrolled by a limping gendarme. (As hammed up by Sacha Baron Cohen, the character constitutes one of the movie’s few tonal dissonances.) Hugo is also the patient tinkerer who works after hours in his clock-tower hideaway repairing the automaton, gear by gear. Then a bitter train-station toy-shop keeper (Ben Kingsley at his best) and his intrepid goddaughter (Let Me In’s Chloë Grace Moretz, kick-ass) set the boy on a path of discovery. Hugo both ticks and flies by, a marvel meant to be pulled from the cabinet and enjoyed again and again.

Our Verdict: The movie itself runs a bit long at 127 minutes, but “Hugo” is worth every minute for the visual feast it provides. We have seen the future of 3-D moviemaking, and it belongs to Martin Scorsese, unlikely as that may sound.

As a theatrical troupe, the Muppets haven’t exactly been AWOL these past dozen years; the gang rocked YouTube in 2009 with their kick-ass rendition of Queen’s ”Bohemian Rhapsody.” But they’ve certainly been lying low while our twitchy, tweet-y times have favored snarkier, more air-quote-driven entertainment, even from puppets. And in a way, that showbiz hiatus has worked in favor of The Muppets. For adults, the movie’s gentle, clever, unironic humor feels freshly, trendily retro now, enhanced by laughs provided in cameos from a very up-to-date roster of stars, including Rashida Jones, Jack Black, Neil Patrick Harris, Selena Gomez, and Emily Blunt. And for kids, blessedly unironic by nature until wised up by nurture, the movie is just shiny, funny, and filled with songs, including a curse-free chicken rendition of Cee-Lo’s ”F- - - You.”

Big, goofily sincere Muppet fan Jason Segel (How I Met Your Mother), who co-wrote the script directed by Da Ali G Show’s James Bobin, stars as a nice guy named Gary, whose happy life in Smalltown, USA, revolves around his longtime girlfriend, Mary (Amy Adams in her professionally adorable Enchanted comedian-sweetheart mode), and Gary’s pint-size brother, Walter. Walter’s obsession with all things Muppet — no surprise to everyone who looks at the felty guy and recognizes him as One of Them — brings the trio to Los Angeles, where they become involved in a desperate fund-raising plan to save the decrepit old Muppet Theater from the dastardly tear-down plans of an evil oilman (Chris Cooper, a great meanie). In fact, the story, with its ”Let’s put on a show!” vibe, is a little wispy. (That’s the climax, folks: The Muppets resurrect The Muppet Show as a one-night telethon.) But the stuff surrounding the story is its own diversion. I like the look of the outdated, run-down Muppet Studios when Walter takes a tour and, indeed, the run-down state of the Muppets themselves as Kermit begins pulling them out of retirement for an onstage reunion. I love the bits with a hint of Pee-wee Herman to them, such as when Gary, Mary, and Walter travel in their car to France ”by map”: We watch a line arc across an atlas, and the vehicle rises out of the water in Cannes. And I’m delighted that The Devil Wears Prada’s Emily Blunt shows up as a haughty British Vogue staffer attending to the whims of a very demanding editor: Miss Piggy. That’s testament not to the power of Vogue — but to the power of Muppets.

Our Verdict: You can rest easy – if you have previously loved the Muppets, you will likely currently love The Muppets. Young or old, there’s nothing better than spending a few hours with the Muppets.

The Rum Diary marks the second time that Johnny Depp has played the proudly dissolute, candle-burning-at-both-ends gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson — or at least a thinly fictionalized version of him. It’s easy to see what’s lured him back to the role. Thompson was a lifelong student of bad behavior — it’s there in the subjects he was drawn to (the Hells Angels, Richard Nixon) and in his drug-addled, often violent antics — but he was also a born agitator, a messed-up rebel-addict with a cause. That makes him the perfect saintly sinner to be played by a Hollywood superstar who still wants to think of himself as a bad boy.

Based on an old autobiographical novel that Thompson pulled out of his drawer and published in 1998, The Rum Diary sets us down in the lush urban tropical backwater of San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1960, where Depp’s Paul Kemp — basically Thompson with a different name — arrives to work for a grimy little newspaper geared to American tourists. This isn’t the bald, deranged, LSD-popping Thompson figure with a cigarette holder jammed in his jaws whom Depp embodied in the unwatchable Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998). It’s Thompson the inexperienced young dandy still feeling his (wild) oats. The characterization, though, remains more or less the same. Depp stares off into space, as if his brain were being slowly eaten by worms, and he speaks in a robo-monotone. You could call his acting ”cool,” but a more apt description would be monochromatic and hollow. Kemp is an acrid shell of a man, fueled by voluminous amounts of alcohol, and though the film pre-
sents him as an adventurer, in a way he lacks adventure: He has nothing of interest to say.

The director, Bruce Robinson, made the end-of-the-’60s cult film Withnail & I (1987), but that film was about a fascinating rotter. Depp’s Kemp is just a hipster blank. He declares war on his shouting hack of an editor (Richard Jenkins) and falls in with a fellow journalist (Michael Rispoli), who becomes 
 his drinking buddy and sidekick, the two of them — like everyone else on the island — oiled by rum. He also meets the most powerful Americans on hand, like Sanderson (Aaron Eckhart), a businessman involved in shady development deals, and Sanderson’s girlfriend, a WASP fatale played by Amber Heard in bedazzling cosmetics: She’s all cocoa skin and Grace Kelly lipstick, like a ’50s magazine cover come to life. Sanderson plans to turn beach property into tourist resorts, and the film treats his cutting of legal corners as a deathless scandal, one that leads to Kemp’s discovery of the evils of capitalism: the world of ”bastards.” But to the audience, this stuff seems like awfully old news. We’re supposed to be witnessing the birth of a great journalist, but Hunter S. Thompson, as his career went on, got swallowed up by his mystique as an outlaw of excess. In The Rum Diary, that myth becomes an excuse for a movie to go slumming.

Release Date: October 28, 2011
Genre: Drama
MPAA Rating: R
Studio: FilmDistrict
Director: Bruce Robinson
Screenwriter: Bruce Robinson
Trailer
Movie Website: RumDiarythemovie.com
Actors/Actresses: Johnny Depp, Aaron Eckhart, Amber Heard, Michael Rispoli, Richard Jenkins, Giovanni Ribisi, Marshall Bell

Our Verdict: There was a reason “The Rum Diary” didn’t find a publisher until a late-in-life Thompson resurgence, and it’s clearer still in this adaptation – there’s no real drama here. The Rum Diary is too muted to convey the intensity that propelled Thompson past most of the other magazine feature writers of his boozy era.

According to Anonymous, the plays and sonnets attributed to lower-class William Shakespeare (Rafe Spall) were in fact written by Edward de Vere (Rhys Ifans), the upper-class Earl of Oxford. According to Anonymous, Queen Elizabeth I (Vanessa Redgrave and daughter Joely Richardson, depending on Her Majesty’s age) was a lusty bed-hopper who bore more than one illegitimate child. According to Anonymous, de Vere was one of the Queen’s lovers and also one of her…well, never mind, because Anonymous might just as well also declare that Elizabethans lived in yurts and invented the game of Sudoku, for all the pompous foolishness masquerading as intellectual provocation in this thumpingly silly yet self-serious period-piece what-if.

The movie is a self-described passion project for Roland Emmerich, the German-born director best known for making end-of-the-world disaster pics, including Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012. The destruction here is confined to a turgid overload of intrigue concocted in cahoots with screenwriter John Orloff (A Mighty Heart), who fills his characters’ mouths with honking exposition interspersed with honking declarations of literary ardor along the lines of ”My poems are my soul!” Ifans is honorable and earnest in a star-crossed production; Redgrave does some queenly hamming in opulent costumes that might have been designed by Project Runway alumnus Chris March. But scholarly debate about the Shakespeare Authorship Question has little to do with this tale told by an idio…syncratic moviemaker up to little more than mischief.

Release Date: October 28, 2011
Genre: Drama
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Studio: Columbia Pictures (Sony)
Director: Roland Emmerich
Screenwriter: John Orloff
Trailer
Movie Website: Anonymous-movie.com
Actors/Actresses: Rhys Ifans, Vanessa Redgrave, Joely Richardson, David Thewlis, Xavier Samuel, Sebastian Armesto, Rafe Spall, Edward Hogg, Jamie Campbell Bower, Derek Jacobi

Our Verdict: It’s geeky forgettable fun for Shakespeare nerds with a suitable sense of the absurd, but possibly a bit dull for director Roland Emmerich’s usual fan base.

Actor Kenny Wormald arrives in Craig Brewer’s thoroughly winning remake of Footloose with a lot to prove, just like his character, Ren MacCormack. Ren’s a big-city high school rebel who relocates to a small town, takes up the right to dance to loud, groovin’ music as his cause (laws on the books forbid it), and eventually wins over everyone from the town preacher’s trouble-making daughter, Ariel (Julianne Hough), to the reverend himself (Dennis Quaid). Wormald, meanwhile, a former backup dancer for Justin Timberlake, is also an outsider choice to play Ren in this energized redo of the beloved 1984 Flashdance-era classic. Yet stepping into sacred shoes once worn by Kevin Bacon, Wormald handily owns the role for a new audience. Same goes for a terrific Miles Teller (Rabbit Hole) in the sidekick role of Willard so memorably originated by the late Chris Penn.

Guardians of the ’80s flame will approve of the production’s sincere respect for the original; church still matters, and so do Ariel’s red cowboy boots. But Brewer, who previously put his high-intensity spin on Hustle & Flow and Black Snake Moan, displays his coolest moves in the way he smartly unties this Footloose from its 1980s moorings. He matter-of-factly integrates the townsfolk. And he establishes a timeless zone in which children of all colors always yearn for freedom, and wise parents learn how to hand over the dance floor to the next generation.

Our Verdict: Leave you cynicism at the door. This is top-quality Saturday night popcorn entertainment. Brewer’s hot-and-bothered remake uncorks the original’s raging libido, and it’s as seamy and sordid as that damnable PG-13 rating will allow.

Even playing the hunted, jacked-up, dude-on-the-run hero of a ”realistic” action film, Taylor Lautner still looks like the world’s sexiest werewolf in Abduction. There’s a stylized quality to his features — not just the lupine snub nose, but the daggerish Son of Spock eyebrows that lend him a squint of intensity even when not very much is going on. That face gives Lautner one advantage as an actor: He’s a great camera subject, like the young Matt Damon crossed with Tom Cruise. It also gives him a disadvantage: When the blankest look you’ve got is already ”intense,” how do you show greater intensity? You squint a little more.

Packed with stoic tattooed Serbian hitmen and hairbreadth escapes (are you yawning yet?), Abduction is a ”high-powered” potboiler that merges the Bourne genre with the junior-assassin thriller Hanna. Lautner plays the secret teenage son of a CIA superagent; when his cover is blown, he and his eye-candy schoolmate (Lily Collins) are pursued by foes and tracked by a CIA overseer (Alfred Molina). Director John Singleton offers bits of suspense, but Abduction is less a movie than a piece of engineering, a glumly ludicrous cat-and-mouse blowout designed to win Lautner male fans along with his girl demo. He’s not a terrible actor, but if he wants a career after the Twilight fades, he’ll pick better films.

Release Date: September 23, 2011
Genre: Action, Thriller
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Studio: Lionsgate
Director: John Singleton
Screenwriter: Shawn Christensen, Jeffrey Nachmanoff
Trailer
Movie Website: Abductionthefilm.com
Actors/Actresses: Taylor Lautner, Lily Collins, Alfred Molina, Jason Isaacs, Maria Bello, Denzel Whitaker, Michael Nyqvist, Sigourney Weaver

Our Verdict: A blockhead espionage thriller from director-for-hire John Singleton (Boyz N the Hood).