Last year direct-to-video action hero Gary Daniels (I Am Vengeance, Fist Of The North Star) battled aliens in Astro. Now Scott Adkins (Hard Target 2, The Debt Collector) gets his turn in Abduction. And while it’s not one of Adkins’s best, at least it’s not as big a mess as Astro was.
Abduction opens with Quinn, (Scott Adkins) trying to rescue his daughter. This involves fighting several people with some kind of control device, (which looks like a scarab), in the back of their neck. He’s doing a good job of it until their boss The Visitor (Daniel Whyte, Triple Threat) turns up. He one punches Quinn through a brick wall and into a lake. Quinn surfaces but emerges in a fountain. In Vietnam.
Meanwhile, hitman Conner (Andy On, Zombie Fight Club, Once Upon a Time in Shanghai) has completed his last job. He plans to settle down with his wife and live out his remaining years in peace. He awakes from a dream about his wife being abducted by aliens to find that his wife has indeed been abducted by aliens. Of course, he and Quinn end up crossing paths and teaming up.
Despite Adkins’s top billing, Abduction is actually On’s film and it’s good to see him kicking ass again. He has a great scene taking out a Russian mafia hit team, several with his hands literally tied behind his back. Adkins, on the other hand, seems to be here mostly as a name to draw in Western audiences. He spends a lot of time in a psych ward providing exposition via sessions with psychiatrist Anna (Truong Ngoc Anh).
Director Ernie Barbarash has proven himself a good if unspectacular DTV director with the likes of Cube Zero and Assassination Games. But here he’s working from a script that doesn’t do much beyond string the fight scenes together. The script is credited to Mike MacLean whose credits are all for DTV fare such as Piranhaconda “presented by” the legendary Roger Corman who has an executive producer credit here.
Abduction is also plagued with some horrendous effects. It has some of the worst CGI bullet hits and blood spray I’ve seen in a long time. And the scene of Adkins falling into the lake at the beginning of the film looks like bad animation.
The fight scenes do deliver. And yes, thanks to one of the alien control devices we do get to see Adkins and On square off. However, Abduction still manages to mess up by not having a climactic battle, which left me feeling very unsatisfied. There is an opening for a sequel, which could, with better writing be worth doing. But I don’t see this creating a demand for it. At least it’s better than Alien Warfare.
Adkins needs a new management team…..he has done enough B level chop sockys to have banked himself a period of time to wait for the right break….all these DTV movies continue to lessen his name.
I was just having this conversation with a friend actually. Adkins does way to many “just for a paycheck” films and I’m convinced he’s linked so many poor films is the reason he hasn’t broken through to the next level.
It does hurt his career,making the same movie with the same people and the same directors. He needs to come to the United States and start picking better roles before his window closes.