Abduction (2011) and How the Twilight Leads Shaped Their Careers Outside Twilight

The Twilight books were a phenomenon when I was in high school. I remember walking down the halls during the lunch break, or between classes, and seeing people holding their copies of whatever the newest Twilight book was at the time. It could have been Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, or Breaking Dawn. I don’t remember the specifics, and, in my mind, they all came out around the same time. Whatever the case, the series of young adult romantic vampire novels exploded in popularity during those years and that popularity kept going while I entered into my initial university years.

When I got to university, one of the first things I did was seek out the theaters. There was the Galaxy Cinema over at the mall. That was the multiplex that would play all the major releases. The superhero movies, the big budget action movies, and that kind of stuff would play there. Then there were the two smaller theaters in the uptown area of the city that would play the smaller stuff. It was at those theaters that I saw things like Moon and The Room. This isn’t about those theaters, though. It’s barely even about the Galaxy Cinemas.

It was 2009 when I headed off to my post-secondary education that would end nearly three years later, after failing a few classes, realizing I didn’t truly like what I was in school for, and dropping out. But the fresh-eyed version of me was ready to take on life. He was also ready to watch some more movies because I’m a guy who likes movies. One of those movies was The Road, which was being released pretty darn soon. I had read the book a year or two before and wanted to see what the movie did with the material. However, it came out around the same time as The Twilight Saga: New Moon. That new Twilight movie took over the Galaxy Cinema, taking up the majority of screens, and pushing everything else out. I didn’t get to see The Road there. This is my way of anecdotally saying that the Twilight movies were just as big as the books.

The Twilight movies were so big, in fact, that the three main actors of the franchise spent years trying to get out of the shadow that has loomed over them for more than a decade. Each of them worked in different ways to put the franchise behind them, through their choices in what movies they followed up with. One of them also, seemingly, left the acting business altogether. I’ll get to him near the end, though, since he’s the one who inspired this entire post in the first place. He was also the one who wasn’t a main character in the first movie. Anyway…

Kristen Stewart played the main character in all five Twilight movies. She played Bella, the romantic lead, a human who fell in love with a vampire. Many of the girls and women who saw the film, who had read the book prior to the movie being made, connected with her. Why? She was a blank canvas. There wasn’t much to her character beyond the simple desire to get out of her mundane life and be in love with the vampire. That was pretty much it. The audience could easily project themselves onto her because there was nothing to set her apart from anybody. There was nothing that truly made Bella unique.

The thing that really stuck with people about Kristen Stewart throughout the Twilight movies was the lack of personality within the character. That wasn’t her fault. That fell on both the writing and the direction. She had been written as an almost nothing character whose only desire was to be loved by a vampire and have a different life. The mannerisms that the character was given, the aloofness and lip-biting being only two of them, felt like they were coming from direction given by Catherine Hardwicke in the first film and not necessarily from Kristen Stewart, herself.

But, as happens with many movies that blow up the way that the Twilight movies did, people put it all on the actor. They treated the performance of a poorly designed character as a poor performance. They treated Kristen Stewart as though she could only give performances of that quality. They essentially pigeon-holed her into this role, as though she couldn’t do anything else. It didn’t help that another movie she had around that time, Adventureland, had her playing another character with similar mannerisms. She had more personality in that one, though, and it gave hints toward where she would go as an actress.

Throughout her time in the Twilight films, Stewart was making other movies that weren’t the big blockbuster flicks that everyone associated her with. She was cast in The Runaways, as a member of the influential, all-female rock group. She had been featured in On the Road, an adaptation of the influential John Kerouac book. And that’s not to mention her prior work in movies like The Safety of Objects, Panic Room, Catch That Kid, Zathura, and Into the Wild. She had more to her than the Twilight movies, and her wide range of film choices would continue after her most popular franchise ended.

The question with Kristen Stewart was never whether she could or could not act. Her movies before Twilight showed that she could. However, many people were introduced to her in a big way through Twilight. Audiences may have seen her before, but they started noticing her when Twilight came out. They were introduced to her through a character who didn’t have a lot of personality. She had to show that she could become a character with personality and give better, more well-rounded performances to the people who were only now noticing her as an actress.

A couple years after The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2, she gained some critical acclaim for Clouds of Sils Maria and Still Alice. That acclaim would only rise when she starred in Personal Shopper a couple years after that. Between those three movies, people really learned to understand that she had talent and her underwhelming performance in the Twilight flicks, particularly the first one, were the outliers. She also ventured back into some slightly more mainstream stuff in recent years with Charlie’s Angels and Underwater. Plus, at the end of last year, she was a part of Happiest Season, a great LGBTQ+ movie. And she’ll be playing Princess Diana in an upcoming biopic. I think it’s safe to say that she got out of the possible typecasting.

How about her main love interest in the Twilight films? What happened to Robert Pattinson after playing Edward Cullen, the broody sparkling vampire? The work that he had to do to overcome the typecasting was a little tougher, mostly because he didn’t have the history in the film business that Kristen Stewart did. Twilight was only Pattinson’s fifth movie, and it was the second major young adult franchise that he was a part of. Two of his previous movies were the fourth and fifth Harry Potter flicks, where he played the tragic Cedric Diggory. And even then, one of those two movies was simply using archive footage. He didn’t do any work in it. It was footage that people had seen before.

That all meant that, upon the release of Twilight, his two biggest roles were in Harry Potter and Twilight. He didn’t have much to back up his talent outside those two franchises, so he was going to have to work extra hard to get out of the typecasting. It didn’t help that the performances throughout the first Twilight movie, from almost everyone involved, didn’t quite work. Everyone gave performances that weren’t well received. Robert Pattinson was going to have to prove that he was more than a good-looking vampire. He needed to show there was more to him than that. He needed to prove that he could turn in a stellar performance.

The way that Robert Pattinson went about setting himself apart from Edward Cullen and the Twilight franchise was to spend ten years without making any tentpole, blockbuster films. Aside from the Twilight movies he was contracted to make, that is. Every year he was in a Twilight movie, he would be in one or two lower-budget dramas that sometimes made money, if only because his name was attached. Movies such as Water for Elephants, Remember Me, and Cosmopolis came out during that time. He wasn’t going to be forced into blockbuster franchise after blockbuster franchise, in the way that his early career seemed primed to do.

When the Twilight movies wrapped up, Pattinson’s face was off the big screen for a year before he really kicked into high gear on the no major blockbusters career plan. The directors he chose to work with were respected directors, such as David Cronenberg and Werner Herzog, who weren’t lighting up the box office, but were making critically-acclaimed movies. He took a starring role in Good Time, the movie that put the Safdie Brothers on the map. Then he made High Life and The Lighthouse. People respected him. They gave him the credit he deserved. He had shown them how good an actor he was, outside of those initial tentpole flicks he had starred in. Robert Pattinson was not going to forever be known as Edward Cullen. He was still going to be associated with the character, but people knew him for so much more.

Now that a decade has passed, Pattinson has been able to transition himself back into those tentpole movies, but in a way that people can see him as more than the tentpole guy. He snuck his way into Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, which was arguably the biggest release of 2020, though the box office numbers certainly wouldn’t back that claim up. He was also cast as the next respected actor to take on the role of Bruce Wayne in The Batman. It took a lot of work and nearly ten years to do it, but Robert Pattinson avoided typecasting.

The final leg of the Twilight tripod also dealt with his fair share of problems in the movie business as he tried to continue a career beyond the movies that made him famous. That’s right. It’s time to talk about everyone’s favourite werewolf, Jacob Black. Well, not Jacob. The actor who played him. It’s time to dive into what went on with Taylor Lautner and what he did to try and salvage his career after the Twilight movies came to an end.

Now, follow me here for a second. I respect Taylor Lautner. I think he’s a good action performer and I feel like his comedic timing is pretty great. But do I think he’s a good actor? Not so much. I’ve seen enough of his movies to confidently say that he’s not a good actor and he’ll never reach the levels of critical acclaim that Kristen Stewart or Robert Pattinson have achieved. Does he want that acclaim? I don’t know. He has seemingly left the movie business, having not been in any movie or television show since 2016. That’s a little bit of a disappointment, since that seemed to be when he really found his place in the business.

Prior to Twilight, Lautner had three film roles and a few odd, here and there, television roles. His biggest part had been Sharkboy in The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D, though he had a noticeable role in the Cheaper by the Dozen sequel, as well. When he got cast in Twilight, however, things exploded for him. He became a huge star, which meant a role in Valentine’s Day, which led to a relationship with Taylor Swift, which then led to tabloids and bigger stardom.

Through Twilight, Taylor Lautner was never the main character. The story was always Bella’s story. Jacob was just a potential love interest. But studios saw enough in that young Lautner guy to give him the lead role in one of their upcoming action flicks. Abduction was released in 2011, the same year as The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1. Nathan Harper (Taylor Lautner) was a teenager who found out that his parents, Kevin (Jason Isaacs) and Mara (Maria Bello), weren’t really his parents. His real mother was dead and his father, Martin Price (Dermot Mulroney), was a spy on the run. Now Nathan was on the run with his neighbor, Karen Murphy (Lily Collins), as he was being chased down by CIA agent Frank Burton (Alfred Molina) and Serbian bad guy Nikola Kozlow (Michael Nyqvist) because they wanted a list of people selling government secrets.

Abduction could have been a good movie. There was a decent enough story to it, though the pacing was a little off. The biggest problem was Lautner himself. He wasn’t leading man material. His performance could not hold the attention of the audience throughout the movie, because he couldn’t give the emotional resonance that it required. He was lacking in the depth of performance. That said, his action chops were good. That would come back into play near the end of his, current, acting career, when he made Tracers. It was like the guy was great stunt performer who was forced into a leading actor role he couldn’t handle.

Although he couldn’t handle the acting of Abduction (he did do a little better in Tracers, if only because he had more experience and it didn’t require as much in the angsty teen department), his true acting talent would come out after the Twilight movies wrapped up. Before that, I want to get to the glimmer of it that came during the Twilight years. Back around the time that Valentine’s Day was set to come out, Taylor Swift hosted Saturday Night Live. She was dating Lautner at that point. There was reference to it, I think. A few weeks later, Lautner would get his chance to host the show. In between each Taylor hosting the show, the whole “I’mma let you finish” fiasco happened. Taylor Lautner used that in his monologue.

What I remember of the episode was two things, both of which still make me laugh. The first was that monologue. He came out, mentioned his relationship, then played out a fantasy. The fantasy involved a martial arts decapitation of a Kanye West mannequin in the name of his girlfriend, Taylor Swift. Something about the way Lautner performed the monologue showed that he had comedic skills. It showed he had some talent, and the stuff he was doing normally wasn’t it. The other thing I remember was a sketch where he was a football player trying to shoot a promo video, but he could never get the facial expressions right. It’s just classic facial humour and he nailed every second of it.

Now, that Saturday Night Live episode was from the time when Taylor Lautner was starring in the Twilight films. He wouldn’t do comedy work again until the year after the Twilight movies ended. And, even then, there was still a bunch of Twilight in it. Adam Sandler brought Taylor Lautner in to play the person who would essentially be the villain in Grown Ups 2. He was the leader of a group of frat boys who continuously harassed the main characters throughout the day. He howled like a wolf, he did backflips, and he performed flew-jumped through the air. He was pretty much doing a full send-up to his Twilight character while being in an Adam Sandler comedy. And it was, to date, the best performance he ever did.

The pairing of Taylor Lautner and Adam Sandler would continue into The Ridiculous 6, the first film that Sandler made for Netflix. Lautner played one of the six half-brothers on a quest to find their father. It was a horribly written character. He was playing someone with a mental disability. But he gave it his all, in terms of the comedy, and I can’t fault his comedic work. It’s just bad that it came at the expense of people with disabilities.

The year after The Ridiculous 6, Lautner was in Run the Tide and Scream Queens. He hasn’t been in anything since. His career took a different turn from Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson. He didn’t quite have the talent to keep up with them in terms of dramatic critical acclaim. But he found his niche in performing stunts and comedic roles. He found some success in each of those areas and could have continued down that path to a semi-successful career. Maybe he’ll come back someday. Until then, this is what we have.

The three main actors of Twilight had to work hard to show that they were more than what people saw in that popular film franchise. One of them showed that she had more personality than people were giving her credit for. Another proved that he was a good actor and not simply a good-looking one. The third found his place, found what he was good at, and showed the world that he had a place in the business. It worked for each of them, in their own way. Even though Taylor Lautner seemingly left the business, all three actors were able to put Twilight behind them, career wise, and have other things to be known for.

The popularity of the Twilight novels led to the movies being made. The popularity of the Twilight movies led to the three main actors becoming household properties. However, they had to fight to keep that popularity after the movies ended. They had to make sure they were known for things other than the Twilight movies. Other actors came out of the movies, too, though they didn’t come with the same baggage as the three leads. People like Anna Kendrick, Christian Serratos, Dakota Fanning, Rami Malek, Joe Anderson, and Lee Pace came out of the movies without worrying about only ever being linked to those characters.

Back in high school, I could never have expected the legacy that the Twilight series would leave behind. I only knew it as that book that a bunch of people were carrying around school. I didn’t know that a bunch of well-known actors would come from it, each with unique careers that would leave a lasting impact. It was a franchise that changed the shape of cinema. Like it or not, it introduced people to many of the actors that are frequently on screen to this day.

Now it’s time for a few notes:

• Abduction was suggested by @SarKittyMcMeow.
  
• The Room (week 25) was mentioned in this week’s post.
• Taylor Lautner, the star of Abduction, which inspired this post, was also in Tracers (week 133), Valentine’s Day (week 168), and The Ridiculous 6 (week 344).
• Abduction saw the third Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance of Alfred Molina, who was previously in Cabin Boy (week 173) and Dudley Do-Right (week 336).
• Joanna Theobalds appeared in both The Ward (week 256) and Abduction.
• Elisdabeth Rohm returned from Mega Shark vs. Mecha Shark (week 300) for Abduction.
• Richard Cetrone was in Abduction and The Scorpion King (week 380).
• If you noticed Kirk Kelly in Abduction, you may have also noticed Kirk Kelly in The Last Airbender (week 399).
• Finally, Abduction featured Ilia Volok, who was in Wishmaster 2: Evil Never Dies (week 410).
• Have you seen Abduction? What did you think of Taylor Lautner’s career outside the Twilight films? Do you want him to return to films? How do you feel about the other two Twilight leads and their careers? Share your thoughts in the comments or hit me up on Twitter for a discussion.
• If you want, you can also suggest movies that I should be watching for Sunday “Bad” Movies. The comments and my Twitter are the places you can find me, and I’ll be sure to read and respond to what you say.
• You can always take a look at Sunday ‘’Bad” Movies on Instagram, where I frequently put up fun stuff related to the movies featured in Sunday “Bad” Movies. Check it out.
• Next week should be an interesting one, if only because it’s covering something familiar. When I wrapped up the first year of Sunday “Bad” Movies, I featured a movie I found on one of my five-dollar-bin box sets. It was called Evil Bong (week 52). Since then, I’ve been working my way through the franchise. It’s time to return to it for Evil Bong: High 5. So that’s what I’ll be taking a look at next week. I would like to see you come back and give that post a read, too.