The worst film I saw in 2011

I wasn't sure whether to write about this but then I recently saw that it had the dubious honour of being the first film available to watch on Facebook - it was like the universe was telling me to do it. To clarify this is taking into account films that I saw in the cinema that were released in 2011, as I may have also watched the first Twilight movie last year - it's been a long year. It should also be noted that films from 2011 that I haven't watched include Transformers 3, Hangover 2 and Zookeeper if you think I'm being particularly harsh. Thankfully I didn't pay to see it due to Odeon's reward card scheme and my wife being intrigued by the trailer, I think we both agreed we would rather have seen something else for free though.

So lets start with the basics - no one gets abducted in this film. That kind of says it all really but I guess Adoption wouldn't have made for such a good title. I can't remember the whole thing exactly but the plot is that some terrorists or something want to find the main character Nathan, to use as bait to draw out his real father, so they set up a fake website about abducted children because they somehow have a photo of him as a child and very accurate age progression software. I don't know who the other examples of abducted children are - maybe they are looking for multiple children of special agents, the film doesn't make this clear. Anyway, the terrorists get lucky though because Nathan has just been given a school project on child abductions *gasp* and through their impressive SEO skills, their fake website is the first result that he chooses over the government's official site. They did actually need to find him in a pretty short time frame, if he hadn't gone to the site himself I imagine they would have had to wade through a lot of false reports from people around the country who thought that the age progression image looked a bit like someone they knew.

But anyway, it all works out alright for the terrorists, they hack his webcam to make sure he looks like er... their age progression estimate? Nathan goes to confront his parents about it, who could have probably saved themselves a lot of trouble by telling him from the start that he was adopted and his real parents died in a car accident (hey it worked for Harry Potter). Before anything can be explained though some fake government agents are sent by the terrorists, who kill his adoptive parents and then blow up his house while he's still in it, despite wanting him for a live hostage. Nathan then escapes with his high school not girlfriend Karen and when he tries to get in touch with emergency services he gets re-directed to real government agents, one of them being Alfred Molina who's also kind of the bad guy because Alfred Molina is always kind of the bad guy. Sigourney Weaver then picks them up, tells them to trust no one but his real dad and some other guy, who I think is just one of his dads aliases and then fakes her death so that the two kids can go on the run.

I remember there being a focus on it being good for Nathan and Karen to stick together, there's even a "I couldn't have done it without you speech at the end" but the only useful thing she does in the entire film is use her feminine wiles to convince some guy at Nathan's mother's grave site to tell them where the flowers on her grave were sent from. So they then get a train to Nebraska, which involves the most uncomfortable scene in the whole film. Amongst the many things that have made me feel old this year, watching a love scene between two horny teenagers was pretty high up there. I found myself squirming in my seat and wondering who exactly could even potentially find this scene watchable, surely even teenagers don't want to watch people their own age getting it on. I guess Taylor Lautner was just happy to get the girl in a film though, and not through being a psychic paedophile.

I think after this point I stopped paying as much attention, the terrorists seem to keep catching up with them for no apparent reason, other than the fact that they're better equipped and armed than the whole of the US government. If the CIA had been any use then the film could have been over a lot sooner as Nathan plays no part in the final outing of Alfred Molina as a traitor, he could have just given the CIA his dad's secret data as his dad would have still told his superiors that he'd found his name on the list. They're often helped by Nathan's half nerd, half jock schoolfriend who has the magic ability of turning up wherever they've travelled to in the country in a hearbeat, using only his own car.

The final scenes are basically to wrap everything up in a nice neat package deal as it turns out that the main terrorist is implausibly also the man who killed Nathan's mother. His dad turns up to kill the main terrorist with a sniper shot from afar and then only talks to his son on the phone. For some strange reason I found myself disappointed that you don't get to see his dad either. I thought that maybe just seeing the actor who played him, having maybe had him turn up somewhere earlier in the film or something, would have made the whole thing feel like it made a bit more sense or just have some kind of purpose. As it stands the whole thing just felt like a big mess that could have been sorted out so much easier if the characters weren't complete idiots.

Twilight ½ / 10