Blank Check with Griffin & David - Abduction with Jason Concepcion

Episode Date: July 4, 2021

John Singleton’s filmography comes to an inauspicious end with “Abduction,” a film that tests the viability of “Taylor Lautner as Action Star.” Longtime friend of the pod Jason Concepcion (Crooked Media’s Takeline and ALL CAPS NBA) joins us as we mourn the untimely passing of Singleton and try to parse why this movie fails so spectacularly. Join our Patreon at patreon.com/blankcheck Follow us @blankcheckpod on Twitter and Instagram! Buy some real nerdy merch at shopblankcheckpod.myshopify.com

What if your entire podcast was a lie? Now alternate tagline, alternate tagline, alternate tagline. The fight for the podcast will be the fight of his life. That's even worse. They're both bad. The first one's, yeah, yeah, I guess so. What if your entire life was a lie is almost something it's half of something right it's you're like okay and right like you're like uh-huh

the i mean look they're like three main posters right the first one is black and white headshot of taylor lautner it's literally his headshot. They probably just pulled it from IMDb Pro. Yes, and some out-of-focus staircase in the background and says, what if your entire life was a lie? Abduction. That's almost something. I feel like if the poster was literally a wanted poster with that tagline

on it, that would work. That would sell the idea. The other poster is Taylor Lautner sliding down the side of a building as glasses cracking, holding a gun. And that one is the fight for the truth will be the fight of his life. This just feels like a poster. I just remember walking by a subway station where this was up and just going like, yeah, I'm never going to say that. I there is nothing in this poster compelling me to ever see this movie. He's sliding.

I've always wanted to see Taylor Lautner slide. But just what the fuck is that telling you? It was DOA because of that. It was like, yeah, what, Taylor Lautner's in an action movie. That's all they had to pitch us on, really. Even though this is a high concept movie. Look, whatever. It is.

I mean, it fucks up its concept, but it's ostensibly a high concept movie. It is. I mean, it fucks up its concept, but it's ostensibly a high concept movie. And also they were very confident that, look, Taylor Lautner's in an action movie was a money pitch. hit pressing play on 2011's abduction was getting teleported right back to that moment in time where taylor lautner was coming off a twilight with more heat than the sun on it it was absolutely plausible that taylor lautner and his abs were the next action star. Big, chesty man. He's ready to fight, right? Yes. That is the main thing to talk about on this episode, because certainly as a conclusion to the filmography of John Singleton,

it is depressing and uninteresting. As a time capsule of this moment in Hollywood and this young man's career and sort of what we do to young stars and all this sort of shit it's fascinating but inherently just what i watched has to be one of the most aggressively uncompelling movies we have ever ever watched for this yeah it's what your eyes just slide off the screen it's dog shit it's dog shit right yeah but it's if you come up with that sort of like you come up with the the matrix right and you're like boring like bad but watchable

respectable but boring you know you're like this is right in the middle of just like nothing compelling happening well i part of the problem and i hate you know to use it to use a uh industry phrase part of the the problems are the third act problems there's a big there's a big set piece at the end of this taylor lautner i'm just going to call his character by his by his actual taylor lautner does is completely inactive in the big set piece at the end he goes uh to a dance he goes to a pittsburgh pirates game he sits there is a conversation and then at the end people over his earpiece do everything and he does and he just stands there and watches it happen well that it's it's almost the most astounding element of this movie was like in some recent episode, because I should mention this is a blank check with Griffin and David.

I'm Griffin. I'm David. It's a podcast about filmographies, primarily directors who had massive success early on in their careers. They're given a series of blank checks, make whatever crazy passion projects they want. And sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they're abducted, baby. projects they want and sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they're abducted baby there wasn't a good line to butcher but i had that one in the chamber this has been a mini series on the films of john singleton and talk about fitting the thesis that i just laid out a dude who comes out of the gate with the youngest youngest still today best director

nominee ever hit movie made man studio system uh and then this is a completely noble uh end to his career which we'll get into a little bit and we'll get into the taylor lautner stuff uh because yes this is this has been a miniseries on the films of singleton called pods in the cast today we're we're closing that chapter because sadly this is the final film made before his untimely death uh gone far too soon yep he's not gonna make another movie well let me double check let me see on imdb pro if he has anything i don't think so i'm sorry abducted two abducted again i if i were his children and abducted two was listed as future projects i would sue imdb like at what point does hollywood's quest for ip become so desperate that they're like uh we're circling taylor lautner for abduction too i don't know do you guys want that

is it time for a comeback there's a there's a lore there you know we haven't really what's going on with his dad it's very mysterious we only see his lips uh you know what what was the big secret still to be revealed why could they not reveal who his parents were why did they make it seem like his mom might have been marilyn? Still unanswered questions. A lot of things that we can unpack in in in abducted to. feel 10 years old in terms of cultural memory when you go like oh right wasn't there a time they tried to make taylor lautner an action star and they put him on a poster with a gun you're like right that was like three years ago but on the other hand it's very representative where hollywood was in 2011 and i think it's very fascinating to think about this movie coming out the same year that uh thor and captain america come out um did you know that the Abduction Twitter account,

at Abduction, still exists? I love it. And recently tweeting, like, wished Michael Nyquist a happy birthday in 2018 after he had died. After he had died, yes. R.I.P. Tweeting clips, I'm your father, but I'll never be your dad.

Taylor Lautner has vanished from plot culture, but the abduction, anyway, I just Googled abduction and that's what came up. Taylor Lautner, let's make this clear. Taylor Lautner has not been in a film since 2016. It's shocking. His last on-screen appearance, period, was a British TV show in 2018. Taylor Lautner has not been on camera acting since before the last time the Abduction Twitter account posted something.

This is, this speaks to, listen, he's bad in this film, okay? Let's just get that out there. It's a flop performance. He's horrendous in this film. That said, the fact that he has, as you just outlined, has not been in a project in three years

now uh speaks to some other there's got to be something else right we're gonna have to dig into this we're gonna have to theorize we're very excited that you're here because you're clearly champing at the bit to get into all of this uh our guest today of course is jason concepcion long overdue on the show thank you so much for being here um this is this is the thing i want to say right off the bat and i say this with full awareness of the fact that i am the one saying this and i want to make it clear i'm not saying this in like an irate way i'm just stating this as an objective sort of shock largely out of the uh my my sort of uh i don't know passive acceptance acceptance of the way this fucked industry usually works i am so surprised that as a white man taylor london

was not given a second chance. I'm not saying he should have been. I'm not saying he's owed that. And certainly there's a history of just like, I feel like usually when an actor is given one chance to be the star of a movie and it bombs and they're never seen from again, it is almost always an actor of color. There is a one-strike policy in Hollywood with actors of color in lead roles. And Taylor Lautner sort of like got that treatment. And you have to wonder if it was somewhat by his choice. It's got to be. I mean, according to listen,

according to Wikipedia, this movie tripled its initial budget almost 35 million dollar budget 90 million box office that includes international i mean you're stretching but it's it's maybe wasn't the worst flop in the universe yeah right like it broke even or whatever and it feels right like pittsburgh probably kicked in a couple million dollars in tech because they're like if as long as you say the name of the city 40 times like you will like we'll let, we'll let you shoot at a Pirates game. You can absolutely disrupt the game. Whatever you need to do, for as long as you need to do it, you can do it. What do you think about how many failed franchise guys get multiple bites at the apple?

You know? And get a couple of movies like this, at whatever budget level they're being tested for. Right. Whether it's a 30 million dollar Lionsgate thriller or like a 200 million dollar CGI spectacle. Anytime a guy is kind of prematurely put front and center in a movie like this. And Lautner, arguably, it made sense to test him at this point. It made sense to test him at this point, right? It would seem that the demand was there, although I think they misidentified what his demand was and who his audience was. But even when those movies flop, those guys usually get a second or third shot. And then those guys usually go like, OK, now I'll do a TV show.

Now I'll do like a Sundance indie movie. You know, they just like kick around for a couple of years. dance indie movie right yes you know they just like kick around for a couple years with with the explosion of streaming platforms and content you telling me this guy can't be on vikings or something yes i mean and look the vikings guy is a perfect example the vikings guy stars in warcraft and that that bombs and then they're like i don't know here are like eight more movies yeah be in this expensive hbo show right he's in that robot show you get to be the dad and lean on pete like just show up and shit i am racking my brain for that guy's name right now and i can't tell you it fimmel fimmel fimmel okay there we go i was i was helping someone prep for a trivia

match today by being like remember travis fimmel is the star of warcraft and that's the only reason it's in my head um but yes here here is like lautner's entire film career okay okay he's in something called shadow fury as young kismet in 2001 then 2005 adventures of shark boy and lava girl in 3d cheaper by the dozen too yeah right in between those he's doing a few like he was on a couple of Bernie Mac shows. Right. He did a little TV. But right. Then that's my wife and kids left and right. Cheaper Sharkboy. Amazing. OK, so then that's 2005. Those two movies. He's endearing himself to a certain generation of audience goers. Right. Then 2008, Twilight. Huge step up. 2009, he gets Jack. Twilight, New Moon. Now he's a fucking matinee idol. Right now he's a pinup. 2010, he gets jacked. Twilight, New Moon, now he's a fucking matinee idol, right?

Now he's a pinup. 2010, Valentine's Day. Now he is at least, in terms of press, dating Taylor Swift. That's part of his fucking identity. He's in that. They're a couple. They're getting papped out in the street. Eclipse comes out that same year.

He's fucking killing it, right? Then the following year 2011 abduction twilight breaking dawn part one the following year after that 2012 twilight saga breaking dawn part two 2013 frat boy andy and grown-ups two uncredited two years later tracers which is his second attempt at doing like an action movie which i i feel like is not even released to theaters it's it's a parkour yeah i don't think but essentially goes like sort of a red box yeah right i think it mostly comes out in other countries there's like no information on that it's a movie that premiered in denmark and malaysia exactly yeah exactly okay uh uh ridiculous six is that same year where he has-

He is one of the Ridiculous Six. That's the one where he has a big part and it's like, okay, it seems like- What number is he? He's four. One, two, three, four. He's four films. Yeah, he's sandwiched between Hurley from Lost and Rob Schneider. Yes.

Who doesn't want to be there? Wow. I believe he is the dumb one. That's sort of his character bit uh a strong-necked man with a happy-go-lucky personality he's lil pete lil pete um and that's 2015 2016 he is in like his fucking indie drama run the tide right yeah right which is about uh uh film focuses on a young man who learns his former abusive drug addicted mother has been released from prison is planning to fix their broken relationship with her two sons and that is his final film performance that is five years ago now and the main thing he has done since then is uh he did

two seasons of a british TV show called Cuckoo. Yep. One in 2014, one in 2018, because British TV takes its time, and he did one season of Scream Queens in 2016. Yep. That's it. Done. Done. That's it. We covered the entirety

of his post-Twilight career. You know, he's only 29. That was a shocking fact. Of his post-Twilight career. Yep. You know, he's only 29. That was a shocking fact. That was the thing that shocked me. That's what kind of fucks with your brain. As I was watching this movie last night, I hit up the old Google machine and I was watching it with my girlfriend.

I said, guess how old Taylor Lautner is. She's like, I don't know, 35. I'm like, no. 37? No. 29. 29. That's a shocking number.

He is 19 in this movie, or at least he's 19 when it comes out. And as we covered because we've been doing the Twilight movies on our Patreon for the last two Breaking Dawns, Taylor Lautner received $25 million per movie. million dollars per movie he made a combined 50 million dollars on the last two films just in upfront salary not even mentioning his percentage of the gross which was pretty high he k stew and pats got all they all got the same deal yeah but once again laudner was 18 years old when he made i know i mean it's great he's two years younger than younger than Kristen Stewart, who is not old in those movies. She's like 20. And he really, especially in the first couple, you're like, oh, this kid's like a baby.

And then he's big, and you're like, okay, he's like the big, hunky guy. But to be in and out of superstardom, like people screaming for you in mass to whatever his life is now, which I assume is, I don't know, he has lots of money and does whatever he wants and good for him. Like, I don't know. I mean, like I might wish for it if I had a monkey's paw.

It might be all right. Like I want to be a movie star and I get to be Taylor Lautner. Maybe I take that. I don't know i just still am absolutely gobsmacked that he has not been in a single thing in in in three years that nobody would put this guy in something let me let me roll the dice with him yeah like yeah once again i just want to clarify nothing in three years and the one thing that makes it three years rather than five years is a show that only aired in England. Right.

I hope he's okay. I hope he's okay, too. And my guess is he's fine. I was going down the rabbit hole a little bit. He is dating a lady named Taylor again. Oh, boy. But she's a registered nurse he's dating someone outside the industry and uh i went to her instagram and she has 141 000 followers god

holy shit just for dating him and her five most recent posts are sponsored i mean so she's just like a registered nurse in like valencia california who also now is a spokesperson because she has so much clout from dating taylor lottner 10 years after he was a yeah now i'm looking at his instagram yeah i don't know he's hanging out with this lady i guess he just seems normal he apparently still lives with his parents he bought a bigger house for his family in valencia and he's like yeah i don't know i just like taking out the garbage yeah he to, he's always wearing a baseball cap that says family on it.

Interesting. He loves his fucking family. And what's interesting is in these cases where guys fucking disappear, right? You usually realize like, oh, at some point they became disillusioned

with the industry and they enrolled in law school. You know, there's like some career change where they go. They got very committed to the rights of animals. Like they just made all this fucking money. And there's a point where they go, I care about something else more. I'm devoting my life to this cause or some weird hobby.

I now own of this. I now run of this. And he just doesn't seem to have a thing like that. That's that's at least publicly telegraphed. Right. Maybe he got very very into i don't know like storming the capital on january 6th everyone scan the video and see if you see a black baseball cap that says family on it

i think the thing that baffled people the most that baffled me and i don't know if there was an answer on this is there was literally a sequel 15 years later to Sharkboy and Lavagirl. Yeah. And where the original Sharkboy and Lavagirl showed up, that Taylor Dooley, who played Lavagirl, was in it, and they recast Sharkboy. That was the one where I feel like a lot of us raised our eyebrows and went like, is he okay? Because it just feels odd that he wouldn't do that. It said he was like unavailable. And I'm like, he's on.

Really? Is he absolutely unavailable? Like, he seems available. It would make sense if that came coupled with some sort of like message from him that was like, look, I enjoyed my time as an actor. It's just something I put past me. I have no interest in doing it anymore. I didn't want as an actor. It's just something I put past me. I have no interest. I didn't want to do it. Right.

Yeah. Which whatever. Yeah. The framing of unavailable. And it's also like, I believe that's a pretty small role in the film. It's mostly about kids. It's a cameo to sort of tie together the Rodriguez universe.

It's also like he's shooting at fucking Robert Rodriguez style in his backyard in front of green screens. It probably would have been a day in a costume to do something that's like a fun throwback to your childhood that would have meant a lot to your fans you know all power to him make whatever decision you want but that's the moment where I'm like there has to be some larger reason there's gotta be yeah and I don't buy that it is just that this movie stained him so much because hollywood even if he had a bad stench to him at this point and the immediate aftermath of this he has two giant twilight movies come out after this the uh the sandler movies were big hits that sandler's like last

big theatrical hit and then sandler's first big netflix movie and the other factor is like at this point we're 10 years out there's twilight nostalgia people would be ready to reclaim him i i feel like the one of the kind of mysteries about this is you know a star at the level of taylor in 2011 has an entire apparatus around him that keeps him working, that keeps him moving. Here's what you're doing next. Here's your next. And these people would all, you know, be economically in some form or fashion dependent on his continuing income. Right. Has he switched teams? Did he fall out with his team? I feel like that's got to be part of it because you don't just like abandon, you don't just stop working to this level.

And he, and he had made, you know, you mentioned his indie that often bespeaks. Here's the next stage, the typical manager thing. Here's your next stage of your career where you show everybody that you also have this in your wheelhouse, right? By the way, people try to make those indies and sometimes they don't work you know this happens a lot like you look at like ryan reynolds had his couple of years where it was like oh the big budget films flop now he's gonna do like a mississippi grind and a woman in gold and whatever and a lot of times people like take like four or five strikes until one of those movies actually kind of pops at a festival it is

odd to do one right look here's the thing i i'm now i'm one i'm posting in the i'm posting a picture in the chat of him and k stew in 2018 like some fashion show and k stew's got like the short you know hair and it's a nice it's a nice image it's like oh yeah they're so like you know they're obviously still friends you know also he look he looks good he looks great he looks absolutely fantastic he looks a lot cooler than he's got the spike he looks great uh on his instagram when john singleton died he posted three separate Instagrams over the course of a few days. Obviously upset about that. I love you.

This one hurts. I never stopped thinking about your smile. Very open, emotional. I don't know. I don't really get it. He still is active on Instagram. He's got 6.5 million followers. He just came out and was like,

look, I have tens of millions of dollars and live a happy life, and I'm not particularly interested in doing anything that I don't want to do. I'd be like, well, that makes sense. It's just weird that he hasn't... Yes, it's obviously weird because he's so young, right? But example, that's what Cameron Diaz has done.

And people are sort of like, oh, I wish he he'd come back but it also was kind of clearly communicated by both her and like her friends but they're just like yeah camera's just kind of done she's married she's happy she's got a lot of money she doesn't feel the need to do this anymore she did the the merry-go-round it's just that his merry-go-round was so brief and look as you said like this wasn't the right but this isn't the right movie for anyone no one that's my question there's so many problems there's no one who makes this movie good right it's not like there's a different actor with this script that you're like they would i mean they'd be better they might be more charming he's not very charming in it but right like structurally let's start here we don't even

get into the meat of the oh this kid was abducted and is uh who he thinks are his parents are cia agents until like 20 25 minutes into the movie like yes we got to get going if like if i'm giving notes on this like why are we spending 15 minutes on his high school life and uh you know shooting longing looks at his neighbor across the street let's get into the spy shit in a 105 minute movie that's 10 minutes of credits like it's really it's it's basically a 90 minute movie you have to establish though that he's weird you know like he's such a freak in high school. He's like the most handsome, built fucking guy. And he's like a fucking, yeah. He doesn't fit in with like the normal crowd.

His best friend makes fake IDs. He lives next door to the prettiest girl in school. Also, like you say, Jason, it takes 25 minutes for this movie to actually get up on its feet. And then I feel about 20 minutes later, they unfold everything and explain the entire situation to you and you're like what the fuck are you doing the whole point of this movie is this guy doesn't understand who he is and you're just telling me and now the rest of the movie is just kind of inert chase scenes and you also realize that he is the mcguffin like he's kind of irrelevant the codes or whatever right he doesn't really he doesn't even know what he's got he's kind of irrelevant. He's got the codes or whatever. Right. He doesn't really, he doesn't even know what he's got. He's just a bargaining chip.

Like essentially, you're watching, you feel like, okay, is he born? Is he fucking Hannah? Is he some super kid built in a lab? Like who are his parents? Yeah, but it's like,

he can kickbox because his dad trained him because he thought someday some people are going to chase you. He's not like a super soldier. And it just turns out like, yeah, we had to like bring you over to a different house because they thought your parents were gonna get attacked because they were trying to expose some people my second note on on on this this film just in terms of structure uh let's can we make our hero more active? He discovers that he isn't who he thinks he is completely by accident. It's this weird coincidence where he and his crush from across the street go

on, just what a weird thing to do. Let's Google missing children. And that's how they find one of these bait websites uh where he then discovers that he resembles this missing child that's a complete coincidence and it's yes the thing that happens to him a website that was created just to bait this one kid not even just like right there's a larger conspiracy that that almost makes sense if you're like this movie is about a weird plague of children who were displaced from their families or whatever right and they're casting a net like there was like a fucking black briar like uh you know born if you're doing born right there was a whole program yeah we're paying random russians in brighton beach brooklyn a wage to watch this bait website 24 hours a day that's the other thing you have to ask

you have to ask has this bait website been up and running for 16 years this guy in flatbush is sitting behind a computer waiting for one hit right to remotely turn on his webcam or did they just launch this website is this new in which case what else have they been trying to find this fucking kid the stakes are so high for them was this their only strategy the other thing is then it's like you're like oh they found him and they're scared because he's actually like a super spy right and it's like right no his dad's a super spy and he like left some data with him he's just some some kid! That's what it is! Just get the dad! Do a movie about the dad.

It's one of those things where if I walked into a studio today, they wouldn't remember Abduction because no one remembers Abduction. And I said, here's my pitch. The Face on the Milk Carton, one of my favorite books when I was a kid, meets The Bourne Identity identity they would be like

holy shit oh my god oh shit don't leave like oh my god and then you know what else you say and you say and it's that but this is also a story about family oh yeah yeah yeah room explodes like if i pitch them most of abduction like not the bullshit we're yelling about, but the kid finds out, and his dad, and we'll see the dad at the end, but we can cast someone for the sequels. We'll have a star there. They're like, yeah, yes,

yes, we have to do this right now. They would not even remember Abduction. I would get away with it again, and it would still be bad. You know, we have a saying in our family. Use sports, don't let sports use you. Hi, it's Jeff Merrick from 32 Thoughts to Podcast. Are you a sports parent, rep sports, travel sports, whatever you call it? If you're like me, you know that one of the great joys of having your kid or kids play sports is travel.

You know, our families use sports to see different parts of the world, meet new people, and stay in a number of different places. Recently, we've started using Airbnb. The kids love it because it feels like a sleepover at a new friend's house, while my wife and I enjoy more space, a proper bed, and mostly a washing machine. That really comes in handy for baseball trips. Trust me. In fact, it was on a baseball trip last summer when my wife sent me a text after the first night saying, do you think we could do this? Look, if you've ever stayed at an Airbnb, you've probably wondered the same thing. Could our place be an Airbnb? And now that our kids have also discovered the joys of skiing,

in addition to travel hockey and travel baseball, we're on the move even more. Well, our house just sits there. Why not make a little extra money to cover some costs, right? We have friends who travel south every winter and they Airbnb their place. Why not? Look, if you want to make a little extra cash, and who doesn't need that these

days maybe your home could be the way to make it happen find out how at airbnb.com yeah here's the other fascinating thing is uh look we'll we'll talk about like why singleton did this movie but like on one hand it's depressing where you're ah, this is sort of like a paycheck thing. Has a star dimmed that much? You know, even at the time, not knowing he was going to die so soon after. Yeah.

Right? This feels like kind of a generic movie. But you look at that premise and you're like, there's something there with him because his filmography is so defined by

men and their relationship to their fathers or lack thereof right yeah yeah definitely he's so obsessed with the the father figure in a young man's life and even like you go to this opening where it's like oh here's a party you know this teenager his weird relationship with his intense father you're like this is shit that singleton has knocked out of the park and all of it's inert it's here's another problem uh and this kind of you could put this under our hero is completely inactive for most of this film it's an action movie taylor lautner has one fight scene really i mean he beats a guy

up with a golf club in his home and then the guy says there's a bomb in the oven and then he goes to check that there is indeed a bomb in the oven and then they jump into the pool. But like Taylor Lautner doesn't actually get to do Taylor Lautner shit like he fights the one guy on the train. And that's kind of it. And here's the thing. Not only is Taylor Lautner at this point most famous for being jacked. Right. Right. Lautner at this point most famous for being jacked right right uh that's the whole thing of like uh new moon comes out it's fucking huge everyone loves him shirtless and then the deadline story is like Taylor and Lautner offered six million dollars or was it eight it was I think a million dollars per ab or it was 750,000 per ab there was some deadline joke about how much he was worth per ab like that was the whole story on him of like his body has driven hollywood crazy and i think that first movie was

relativity ryan kavanaugh trying to make stretch armstrong with taylor lautner stretch armstrong a weird 70s toy that was revived in the 90s i was a fan of but was never hugely popular as like a mythology right was just oh what if you filled a goopy dude with corn syrup and you could stretch him he just looked like some blonde bodybuilder yeah and then every i had one and then eventually you broke it it was weird and weird stuff leaked out of it yes i loved them i had the stretch limo i had the Stretch Limo. I had the Fetch Armstrong. I was into it. I was arguably America's biggest Stretch Armstrong fan. And I felt no excitement when they announced that Taylor Lautner was playing Stretch Armstrong. I also just want to mention, across the 90s, Disney had the Stretch Armstrong rights for a while.

At different points in time, they announced Tim Allen is going to be Stretch Armstrong. It's a family comedy. Then it was Danny DeVito is going to be Stretch Armstrong. We're casting against type. Then it was, Danny DeVito's going to be Stretch Armstrong. We're casting against type. The joke is that he's short. Then it was, That sounds good. Jackie Chan is Stretch Armstrong.

You're going to see him bend in ways that Jackie's never even bent before. Then at some point, Disney's like, this is fucking nothing. Get out of here, right? And then Relativity, like, buys it at a yard sale

and goes, here's our pitch. What if Stretch Armstrong was hot and young? We're paying him six million dollars. Everyone's losing their fucking mind about this. And then off of that deal, he starts getting all these other action movies lined up. Stretch Armstrong never comes out. It goes through so many different directors and writers. I think Nicholas Stoller was supposed to do it at one point.

Breck Eisner. Yeah. You know, Just never, never seems to make any real progress. But he's like in talks for all these different things, and then Abduction becomes the one right off the runway. Lionsgate's like we want this. We're gonna have this come out before

the last two Twilights. They go to Singleton and we covered this a little bit in Four Brothers, but the year of Four Brothers is the same year as Hustle and Flow premiering at Sundance. The two movies were shot at the same time. He had pitched Hustle and Flow to Paramount. They passed. Then Hustle and Flow blew up at Sundance and Paramount makes the biggest Sundance deal up until that point in history for the movie and the number was juiced because contingent with that deal was uh paramount had to produce like three more movies of proteges of singletons for which singleton would get paid a million dollars per movie um and it seemed like he had a first look deal at paramount to both make his own stuff and to shepherd new young filmmakers and nothing else came of that ever again. They just fucking sat on him for like five years. And he was really frustrated. Once the deal had expired, he takes pretty much the first thing that's offered to him, which is this movie. I think they sort of go like, this thing's a green light. It's going. We want this fast. You could start filming this in fucking five minutes if you wanted to like it's ready to go

and it dinged his career and then also paramount sued him and said that he had uh because he i'm sorry he had sued paramount for not living up to the contract and paramount countersued saying he breached the contract by taking abduction which he said i only took abduction once the deal was over after you sat on me so this whole movie becomes a headache for fucking everybody terrible but the weird origins of this script are this is written by a dude named uh was it sean christiansen that's right the lead singer is stella star exactly yeah so he is a pratt institute like graphic design visual artist then he starts this band on a lark that ends up being a big indie band uh they're touring with big groups and then right around the time that they end he decides that he wants to write movies and he writes several spec

scripts all of which immediately sell for like record amounts of money what a business right he's like a former indie rocker who's now selling million dollar spec scripts it's the monkey see monkey do thing right like they're just like oh someone bought one of your scripts but we want one of yours we want to be in the sean christianson business right so his first one is uh sydney hall which he ends up directing 10 years later as the vanishing of sydney hall yes correct so that was his thing that was his calling card movie uh then uh there's some movie called enter nowhere which does end up later getting made with scott eastwood and katherine waterston but he's like one of these guys where none of these movies are getting made but they're getting sold for big money and then uh he he writes abduction on spec

which at the time is just referred to as an al Hitchcock inspired thriller and a sci-fi movie called The Karma Collision, which goes for one point five million dollars. And like Ridley Scott's buying one. Warner Brothers is buying one. He's all over the place. And then these movies just kind of sit on a shelf for like six years. Right. Nothing's getting made. And then like Taylor Lautner's a thing. Lionsgate's making all these Euro thrillers. They want to make a Taylor Lautner with a gun movie. I think this just suddenly gets packaged very quickly together of, oh, that was a hot spec script three years ago. It stars a teenager. It's an action thriller. You could put him in that because it's not like there are a lot of 16 year old thriller scripts lying around in hollywood

ready to go right you have to just imagine it's like oh we want to make him a the next movie star give me a teen action movie right there's not a ton of them right yeah so this just like immediately gets fast-tracked but they also bring on uh what's his name jeffrey uh knock knock monanoff uh knockman off who did that movie traitor oh oh traitor oh the don cheetle movie he wrote yeah yeah yes it's like it's like a terrorism movie right it's like a bomber movie or whatever yeah okay right he's also one of the credited writers on the tourist yeah great movie a phenomenal movie and then since then since then... He made the movie Replicas with Keanu. He made movies that don't exist. He makes movies that don't exist.

He made movies that don't exist, but they bring him on to rewrite it. And it feels like he rewrote the script almost entirely. You have to imagine that whatever fucking script Christensen wrote, you know, years earlier that had heat around it, that was described as Hitchcockian,

does not really resemble what this fucking thing is. Not at all. That is, you said, Jason, the Taylor Lautner like team must have come in and overthought this thing to death because it just feels so flattened out. I mean, it's clearly like one of the notes was Jason Bourne is big right now. Can we get some Jason Bourne elements? It'd be great if there was a flashback and he kind of remembers this traumatic thing that happens to him when he slides down a ramp a la Jason Bourne and then jumps to the ground. He should hurt his leg and then he should limp away. Like all these kind of things. Fight on a train. I mean, Christensen after this gets so disillusioned with how his scripts were treated in Hollywood that he decides to make his own short film, which then wins the Oscar.

Wow. Wrote, directed, and starring him. It's called Curfew. Right. I'm not a huge fan. Fair enough. And then he, I was very surprised when it won that year. But then he turns that into a feature which kind of doesn't exist i completely completely doesn't exist would be my guess yes before i disappear is the name of the

feature and then he went back and directed sydney hall his spec script that got him attention in the first place a decade plus earlier and that also and that seems to be that. Yeah, disappears. I mean, it's this collision of non-existent things. The thing about Taylor Lautner is, and I don't mean to be rude, he's very swole in the Twilight movies all of a sudden, but he's not doing any action in them. There's a werewolf that does action. The action is happening on a

computer like he does not do any hand-to-hand combat right he carries bella or he starts to leap and then they call cut and he walks off screen and they replace him with the the wolf i think you've put your finger on on on what is probably is is certainly part of what has limited his career in terms of the action genre. I mean, just watching this movie, there's a fight scene, but Taylor doesn't land any kicks. It's always like, here goes Taylor into the spin,

and then they cut away, and then you see the guy flying across the room. There's a chase scene towards the ends you know at at the uh at pnc park and that's the only time you kind of get that parkour kind of thing happening where it's like where was this the whole movie i i get the feeling that maybe he's just not good at action and but he's swole but jason this is what is absurd and this is the is the other reason Hollywood got so into the idea of making him an action star. Taylor Lautner, a black belt martial artist from the age of eight. He competed in national championships.

The guy can fucking fight. You can watch videos of him as like a kid doing shit. And even this is my background on my Zoom window right now. But when he went on SNL, his fucking opening monologue was him doing jump kicks and shit. Like he can fight. Now, there is a difference between actual competitive martial arts and on-screen fighting. Because on-screen fighting is in many ways closer to dance than it is to martial arts. Right?

closer to dance than it is to martial arts right and even the best martial artists on film tend to understand that and understand that there's a dance-like element of the choreography and what works well in combat does not necessarily play well on screen and vice versa but in theory one of the things they're paying for with this guy is he should be able to do his own stunts the thing is it's beyond the action which is not good and in like it's his entire physicality he seems incredibly awkward with doing just human motion like just just i mean i'm gonna rip a friend of the pod allison wilmore this is a she wrote a review of this movie years ago where she she basically she nailed it like this is the first film i've seen where an actor when where when an

actor goes to put his hand thoughtfully on his chin i'm afraid he might poke himself in the eye she's just like i'm just like you know like you're like i don't think this guy actually knows how to move i'd like to his body go ahead i'd like to highlight two moments along those lines. The first is, so Taylor arrives at this secret safe house, and that's where he picks up the phone and other things. And he's searching through a rucksack, right? And he's looking through it as if he were blind. Think of the way a blind person would look through something without looking down, without opening it and looking down. He's shoved his hand into there as if it's a crevice or something.

And he's just kind of feeling around. He's staring at the ceiling. Who looks through a backpack that way? You would open it and look inside of it. looks through a backpack that way. You would open it and look inside of it. Then there's another scene finally where, you know, Lily Collins has been attacked on the train and we cut back to Taylor Lautner, Nathan Harper. He is in their cabin on the train sitting in the chair in a, what is he even doing? He sitting there like i can't even describe he's he's kind of leaning back he's got one arm like on the window and he's just kind of in weird

repose doing nothing in a way that no one has ever sat unless it's like for a wrangler jeans ad like why are you sitting like that this movie also has truly and i know this is a favorite subject of yours david but truly one of the least convincing screen kisses i have ever seen oh i know it's awful and again i feel like and it's supposed to be a moment of like oh now they're alone they've been on the run and now they're just like ripping here is the heat there's the heat you ready for this chemistry folks it's gonna blow you off the screen they ostensibly dated after this really him and really yeah i mean here's the thing it's the twilight i keep going back to twilight because it's the sort of optical illusion i just watched all five of

those movies for this podcast and i'm like well but he kissed kristen stewart in twilight and it was hot right and then i'm like wait did he kissed kristen stewart in twilight and it was hot right and then i'm like wait did they really they didn't actually kiss much like right it's like very because they're always like about to and then she's like oh i can't they have the one time yeah and like then you're like okay yeah but he did actually like well no and you're like yeah okay but he he he like sat and moved and ran around you You're like, no, actually, everyone in Twilight kind of just walks with their hands at their side slowly in and out of location. It is a lot of people being like, hello. And especially him with this tree trunk body.

He would probably barely know how to operate after he put on 60 pounds of muscle or whatever the hell he did. Well, can I throw out my big theory about his performance? And this sort of ties into everything we're sort of saying about like the pressure that was on him, the team surrounding him, how much everyone's trying to manage his career and what they thought he should turn into and everything. David, your background right now on Zoom is Taylor Lautner's Sharkboy. He is fun in that movie. He is a better action star in that film than he is in this movie. He's got some charisma on screen.

He's got some coiled anger. He does better fighting in that CGI movie in which he is in a fucking ice cream land with a shark fin on his back than this one, right? And he's what? He's 12 in that movie 11 10 when did it come out uh he was born in 92 that movie came out in he's like 13 he's like 12 or 13

13 but he he is more he that is a better audition tape for him as an action star than this film is okay then twilight puts him in this like emotional uh sort of love sick uh heartthrob mode which we've said in our twilight commentaries what he should have done was gotten himself a sparks he should have done a fucking nicholas sparks movie he should have doubled down on his female audience he should have done the channing tatum thing he should have taken his time and slowly built it up showed he could do comedy this and that like channing tatum it took him a while before guys were accepting him in action movies this is the thing he could have i refuse to believe that he couldn't have post abduction i i think he could have maybe not maybe

not people really had their knives out for twilight and you know stewart and pattinson they went to ground like they just went to Europe and started making art movies. They were like, fuck, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. I'm not doing Hollywood for a while. But yeah, there was so much... People really reviled the Twilight thing, unfairly, in my opinion, by and large. So maybe he couldn't. I don't know. I don't know.

Well, I also just think there was this thing of selling him as an action star before anyone had seen proof of concept. And the idea that it was like he had lined up five movies with multimillion dollar paydays before one of them had successfully come out and then all of them fall by the wayside. But I do think there was just this thing of everyone knew they wanted him to be an A-list action star, but no one had identified what his movie star persona was. And so it feels like both he, his internal pressure, and the team around him and everyone was just fucking flattening him out. Was just sort of going like, just be like normal. Be like John Normal Guy.

And you watch this performance and it does feel like everything he's doing is so overthought every motion like there's someone in his ear being like normal normal yes and he's like yes yes no feelings no thoughts right where you're just like even to the degree where you're like this guy should be getting more emotional about these things that he's finding out his parents just died in front of him in other scenes you're like he should be more aggressive and everything is just kind of like flattened yeah there's no edge at all to your point he doesn't and then this feels like a very conscious choice he doesn't really kill anyone in this movie this is an action movie and they take bloodless yeah they really take care to, I would theorize, protect something of that kind of like Twilight goodie image. When he fights the guy on the train, he kicks out a window and then hurls the guy out the window of a moving train. But then they're very careful.

Singleton is very careful to show that the guy absolutely survives being thrown out of the train. Pretty unscathed. Yeah. I mean, right. It would be better if he was like, again, if this was more of a straight up Bourne thing and he was like snapping someone's neck 30 minutes in, but they just, that's not what they want to do.

They're too like, no, no, no, no, no. But also, I feel like you could have your cake and eat it too, where it's like, this is some repressed side of his personality. And it's coming out and he's like scared by his own violence. It's a switch flip. Yeah, totally. I understand that you want him to be in sweetie pie mode, but that also gets into like the contradictory nature of what they're asking him to do in this film. And how kind of irrelevant his character largely is to your point about irrelevancy so this movie is basically an

extended chase scene and then at the end after the uh the reveal that one of the top cia agents who has been working on this case is actually a bad guy. His name is on this knock list that Taylor Nathan has been carrying around. And there's been a murder at PNC Park and Nathan has been running from international assassins and the CIA shows up and they're like, okay, you can go, bye. Right. It's a bit of a damp.

It's like, oh God. Thanks for solving that mystery and you sir are under arrest like you know like I'm looking at the notes that the great J.J. Birch assembled for us for this episode and he has

these quotes here where was it where everyone's just so fucking confident about the fact that this thing's going to be a franchise joe drake who ran lionsgate is like this is our born the story is set up there's a great character there's going to be lots of places we're going to take it singleton's like we're going to do two or three movies like those guys david david david i have to correct you i have to correct you because the specific wording here is so much worse than what you just said.

It's a bummer. Singleton's verbatim quote is, I think we're going to get at least two or three movies out of this. Yeah. But like, you can read that. Bare minimum we're going to milk three out of this. Squeezing an orange and they're like, no, no, no. There's definitely at glass three cups of it yeah you know i the funny thing is you know nick and nick and jj point this out it's like this is

like a rough time for lions gate they got a lot of crap uh clogging up theaters movies like uh conan uh the conan remake and and this and it's like ah shit like they saw had been their money franchise and their saw is finally gone. Right, Warrior, which is fucking quietly one of the best American films of the last 10 years, but they totally mishandled, bombed, and fucked up its Oscar campaign.

And they were so screwed, and they were pinning their hopes on this, among other things, and then The Hunger Games comes along, like, right after, and, like, totally turns the studio around and that's like what they like they they found a real like you know young adult franchise that people actually cared about and like latched onto that versus like trying to kind of invent one out of whole cloth

like out of nothing here and like who who gives a shit like you'll you won't pull what's like what's his fucking name nathan price nathan harper nathan price yeah but but like it's it's committing the two cardinal sense of franchise building which is there's nothing interesting in the mythology of this movie and your lead character is completely unwritten like we don't want to follow this guy doing anything and there's nothing going on in the world at large that is compelling but you load this movie up you know it's a singleton and you always have that hope in the back of your mind when we're doing this podcast especially we know a bomb is coming but it's like this has been an interesting career an interesting director and then you always want something to be a happy feat too you want to go like wait this is secretly a masterpiece no one

talked about this right right and And then like Taylor Lautner. Okay. Lily Collins. I like Lily Collins. Alfred Molina. Jason Isaacs. Sigourney Weaver. Maria Bello.

Michael Nyquist. You're like, oh shit. Like everyone in this. And probably because it's Singleton. They're like, oh yeah, sure. I'll do a John Singleton movie. Like he still has enough, you know, juice. And John Singletonleton you're like the

guy's gonna get on base right i know this thing's not a home run it yeah i uh i have i can't say how i know this but i but uh oh my god as i understand it michael nyquist this is his first american movie and so right it's like right after the dragon Tattoo movies are a thing. And as I understand it, Taylor and his manager were on a plane and they were watching Dragon Tattoo. And Taylor said, I want that guy in my movie. And that is how Michael Nyquist came to book his first American role. So Taylor also made his career? I mean, honestly, good for Taylorlor lautner but that's like that is also fascinating to me right that we talk about and i understand they seem to be different people

right they seem to have different objectives in their career but pattinson and stewart very quickly start going like gotta find the filmmaker right right i find the filmmakers i want to work with i find the collaborators i want to work with i trust them the guy does seem to have some taste if he's watching michael nyquist on a plane and going like that should be the villain right i mean a it seems like he's watching shit i know that's not a deep cut but like he's watching foreign movies and then identifying actors and telling studios who to cast yeah i think i mean it's right i guess it's sort of it's in one way it's kind of hacked to see michael nyquist and be like yeah that guy should be like a euro villain but he kicked ass at that you know he should still be doing it's sad that he died like he he should still be just churning out

like because he just michael nyquist just like puts a little salt on it you know it's just like a little bit better than it needs to be him playing like this sort of vaguely russian guy who's like you bad considering this is his first american film yeah and then what he dies in 2017 uh he died in 2017 yeah so in six years he did a mission impossible and john wick that's like pretty good yeah from this you know inauspicious start in american villain roles he got two two all-timers on the board and he did a couple you know did a bunch of other movies and he's in a hidden life that's a great scene like that he did that you know that Gerard Butler, Gary Oldman submarine movie that I haven't seen, but I keep being like, there's got to be something with that one, right? I mean, Gerard Butler, Gary Oldman submarines. I think Mike Ryan stands for that one pretty much.

Yeah, right? Like, come on. That has to be a little fun. Common and Linda Cardellini are in it. Oh, fuck. Come on. You know, how bad could it be right it's directed by someone he's directed by like a nba 2k donovan marsh like just a name where you're like that's just a computer created that name that's nothing uh i i've told the michael nyquist

uh uh john wick story on here before right yeah? Yeah. Just tell it again. I'd love to hear it. He got hurt. It's a quick story. But a lot of the crew from the John Wick movies worked on the tick and especially a lot of the hair and makeup team.

There's one scene where Michael Nyquist is talking to his grunts or whatever and someone pushes him up against a wall and they split his head open the placement was just really fucking unlucky and this like thug slams him up against a wall and the back of his skull goes directly against like the corner of a pillar and uh uh cracks the skull open it starts bleeding profusely passes out people were like was there supposed to be a blood rig for this scene it takes a moment to realize right so then like he's fucked thankfully

he doesn't have serious brain injuries but they got stitched up his whole skull is like fucked right they have to like shave his head and full stitches down the front of his skull and the hair team is like freaking out because they're like we've shot half the movie the whole thing takes place in this compressed timetable, right? Like the John Wick movies are almost happening in real time. We've shot all these scenes all over the chronology of the film.

And he's got this look and now we've shaved his head and he has this scar and we can't put a wig over it. Not only is the wig going to look fake, but we can't put it over it because the scar is too sensitive. And they were like freaking out in the makeup chair. michael nyfus just goes i wear a hat

and he takes a fedora off the table and he puts it on and he wears it for the rest of the movie and if you watch that film sometimes he has a fedora and sometimes he doesn't that's how you can tell which scenes were shot before and after he got a skullcap but he was just like i wear a hat he's fine don't care they went but you weren't wearing the scene i wear that he put the hat on as some other the guy's got a hat you know the guy's got that hat sometimes it's not for emphasis sometimes yeah i just think that's a great story like he's just no nonsense like i don't know i put the hat on sometimes i love that but here's the thing about the great michael nyquist and like the other six good actors who are in this movie.

Yes. None of them are good. It's not their fault. Like, you know, but like you're, when they're cutting to Melina or Nyquist or Sigourney or whatever, you're like, okay, well, all right, good. Now I'm going to get five minutes of something, right?

But they don't have anything to do either. None of them have, like. Sigourney's big move is to use mylar balloons graduation balloons wedding in order to shield nathan harper from being seen that's what they gave her to do in her big like introduction reveal i'm not your therapist i'm actually a cia agent i've got 12 balloons stand behind them and then her her her quote unquote quippy action movie line after that is she releases these balloons so they cover up the security camera in the hospital and then i believe she says i hate balloons why they just did you a

favor what's your problem if you hate them that much you don't have to use them for a fucking disguise get a flower arrangement there's a scene early, her big action scene. I get, you know, when she's driving them and she's like, forget the girl. And she's saying like, I'm, you know, there's going to be one second. I'm going to drift this car around a corner over a bridge. There's going to be a ridge that you're going to jump over. And I'm like, okay, okay. And then he jumps onto what just looks like grass like a slight slope like nothing you

know i was expecting him to jump like into the air you know maybe do like a roll or something and like that is abduction that's the whole movie is just it's kind of like a movie that watched the born identity and it's like yeah we're doing, but then they don't actually know how to do that. But here's, like, what should the main juice of this movie be, right? I'd say, A, this kid figuring out who the fuck he is, what his history is, who his real parents are, you know, shit that, like, I imagine

if Singleton had signed on to this and had actually been given, like, space and a fucking year to redevelop the script to his tastes he probably would have honed in on thematically right you would have had anything in the first act of the movie about this fucking kid's relationship to his father and some sense of longing and anything that makes it like more of a rug pull when he finds out his parents aren't real and more of a longing

actively throughout the rest of the movie trying to figure out where he does come from. But also the juice of this movie should be secondarily getting all these fucking pro actors, right? People who just fucking are in the pocket, know how to show up for something like this and just deliver the goods. Getting tossed around from one to another with all them saying no i'm the one you should trust yeah like it should be that paranoia of who right who who's telling you the truth man there's so many reliable veteran actors

here that i don't know who to believe right melina seems chill right Sigourney's a legend like what do I do and I feel like that Sigourney car scene is the only one that comes close to feeling like hmm like I when she's giving her like there are only four of us who's the name of the guy on the phone huh that's Alfred Melina okay he was my boss he might not be anymore She she just is able to toss that off with enough of a quiet Sigourney confidence that I was like, this is the one time in the movie where I'm actually kind of interested in whether or not I can trust the adult figure in his life. Whereas every time Malina's on screen, I go, I don't know, whatever. I mean, they blow it off the bat with the reveal. with the reveal. So Kevin and Mara,

played by Jason Isaacs and Maria Bello, have been raising Nathan for 16 years secretly. He is not their son. He comes to realize that he is not their son and he confronts sort of Mara about it. And she doesn't fight it at all.

She's been keeping this secret for 16 years and she's just like yep that's true you're not my you're not uh you're not our son what like can we i'm also not your therapist right who are you yeah but also it's such a deflation to like try not to just criticize this movie for what I think it should have been instead. Right. But let's just say if there is the movie in which suddenly he realizes he can't trust anybody. Right.

That everybody's in on it. And the reveal that comes in the last 10 minutes is actually all these people cared about you a lot. You were not abducted. They were not villainous. These were all friends of your parents. They were in on it together to protect you and protect them. Right. That's something. But to very quickly just have Maria Bella go, yep, you're right. Yes, you are part of a weird conspiracy. I love you very much. I do genuinely love you as a mother. We are friends with your parents. I'm sorry. I'm going to take a bullet really quickly. I'm dead. Just feels like, well, you're not getting the ultimate payoff of his parents were really his parents. They did raise him. They did care for him.

It wasn't an act. And you're also not getting the paranoia tension of, oh my God, my parents, who are they? Did they kidnap me? Do I hate them? Like you,

the second the parents become a threat, they're immediately defanged and then killed and then he's grieving them. In five minutes. In Act Two, when he refers to them, he calls them Kevin and Mara. He calls them by their names.

He was raised by these two. He loved them as parents. And within less than 24 hours, he's already, I'm calling these people by their first names. They are not my parents. He drops them. That's a fucking movie. Like, I don't need this big chase movie. You can make a thriller that is a dude realizes he's the kidnapped kid and spends a movie trying to figure out whether or not his adoptive parents are criminals.

Right? That's probably what this fucking script was in the first place. If it's described as Hitchcockian and someone had any interest in it off a spec script yeah that's the structure of the face of the milk carton act one is her being like why is my face on this milk carton are my parents bad right and then act two is the damn finally breaks but there's a lot of tension and the parents are like no this is the situation you were dropped out to spoil the face of the milk carton but you were dropped off at a front door by our real daughter. Right.

And she was your mother. And then Act 3 reveals that's not true either, but the parents didn't know it. And it's perfect. It's got two Hitchcockian about turns, whereas this is like, you're actually the son of a super spy. And then the final twist is like, and also he had some data, like he had a list. That's the final twist is like and also he had some data like he had a list that's

the second twist who cares but also as you said it's truly within the span of five minutes that he confronts his mom about it yeah she owns up to it with radical transparency and emotional honesty and then gets murdered you know it's a movie that does the thing that you're talking about you're both talking about really well uh for you know, it's not necessarily a good movie, but I think it does it. This kind of thing pretty well is running on empty, running on empty. That's the kind of movie. I am not who I thought I was. There's this there's this long, long backstory that I had no idea about.

I'm just learning about it now. It explains a lot of things. Pieces fall into place over the course of the movie uh and it seems like maybe this the original script was something like the river phoenix uh vehicle running on empty where he uh but but apparently not apparently they decided to go a different way it's just all the wrong decisions i mean it's also just like even just in terms of i think how poorly this movie sets up the central romance right of just like okay so you start cold open at a party right here's john singleton he's done some great fucking teenager party scenes right like the whole time i'm watching this i'm thinking about the fucking dough boy backyard, right? Like the whole time I'm watching this, I'm thinking about the fucking

doughboy backyard party and boys in the hood and how there's a sense of actual like life and vibrancy there. I feel like he gets the social energy of a party, the dynamics of it. It feels like there's a density to it. This is just randomly cutting

to different background extras, background actors, just kind of glibly like giving a thumbs up and holding a red solo cup right like it just feels so non-specific he's talking to his best friend about fake ids yeah and then like there's the next door girl that he's always had a crush on she's got this jerky boyfriend they get in a fight taylor lautner sort of like gets in his face he passes out in the front lawn with his

shirt off his dad comes and picks him up embarrassed. Then he gets assigned to a school project with her. She comes over, immediately goes, hey, check out this cool website. The website's a phishing scam just for him. Then when he solves the mystery, he goes over to her because she's the only person he trusts. And then they're off. And the movie never kind of digs into what should be, I guess, the fucking like Peter Parker, Mary Jane. I'm the sweet boy who's never had the courage to tell you I've had a crush on you this whole time while you've dated a bunch of jerky guys.

Even even after the roller coaster ride starts, there's that that love, that romantic relationship doesn't track within itself. I mean, so they spend the night after diving out of their therapist's car, they spend the night in the woods holding each other. Diving is strong. Okay. Rolling out. They hop out. Yeah,

they hop out. They spend the night in the woods on a blanket. She, as she's, as they're sleeping, spooning together, she tells him that he's been crying in his sleep. Then they get on the train,

you know, 20 minutes later in the movie, and they get to the cabin, and they're like, oh, this is weird. This is awkward, isn't it? Now we're spending time alone. You guys, why is it weird? You slept in the woods spooning each other. Also, they've known each other since they were six.

Like, it's like this movie has the energy of their dynamic as if they were she was the new girl at school on her first day she got assigned to his lab partner and they're getting to know each other in real time but the movie is actually telling us that they've known each other for fucking 10 plus years and just have never crossed that threshold this is the problem though look like the a sigourney weaver when they're in the car says like dump the girl you don't you know you don't need that right and then that's supposedly there's that's the rift between them a little bit as she's like well did you know maybe you should have gotten rid of me right didn't you know like and the answer to that is like absolutely he

should have gotten rid of you provide nothing you're not helpful not not in a rude way it's just like what are you doing here you're in danger like just go home you're not involved in this at all and in so like what should be binding them together is electrifying chemistry like that should be well yeah of course you should go home for your own safety but i think you know i can't resist you and instead it's like yeah it's like they they got told by their biology teacher they have to be together and they're like okay right you know like they're not there's nothing going on between them no and she's cute i love lily collins emily in paris i think about that fucking scene in the first raimi spider-man movie where he's taking out the garbage and she's walking out of her home with her shitty dad yelling at her.

And it's like that scene is like what you fucking need in a movie like that to just set up immediately all the history. This is the first time that Mary Jane is actually kind of seeing Peter in a different way that he's sort of starting to show how much he's actually paid attention to her over the years. But it's like simultaneously establishing the history of these two characters their adjacent lives this line that's never gotten crossed and both of them considering the potential for the future and it's like that doesn't take long that's a three minute scene but this movie doesn't do any of those scenes like the closest thing it does to that is the scene where jason isaac trains taylor lautner but it feels like that's the most they

invest in setting up any of these relationships in a movie. That's all about who can you trust? The scene you're talking about Griffin, like those are movie stars. Like I know that at the time, maybe you wouldn't say like, Oh,

you know, these guys are, but that's why that movie works. Cause they correctly identified movie stars. They made movie stars. Yes. The movie, I feel like attempts to do that in a really cam-handed way when they're at the party. Nathan is at the party and then all of a sudden Karen shows up with this completely we-never-meet-him boyfriend who is standing next to her.

The Flash Thompson. Yeah, the Flash Thompson. She locks eyes with nathan there's what is i i guess they were trying to generate electricity in that moment and the boyfriend looks at her like how i can see that you love this person and that's really it that's that's the only suggestion that lily is unhappy in her life that there's something else that only Nathan can fill for her. Well, this movie also has some oddly stylized zooms, right? Because you consider this is a Bourne ripoff.

It's in the wake of those movies being so big and the Greengrass style kind of dominating this type of thriller. And like something like the Taken trilogy is sort of the inept version of that where it's just a thousand cuts and these quick zooms in all of that but you're sort of getting into like docudrama style right this movie has these zoom-ins that feel like they're out of fucking nashville like they're these like weird sort of like pointedly artificial altman zooms where one of them is pushing in on Lily Collins as she dramatically rips up the photo of her and her boyfriend in half, which is that's how you know she doesn't like him anymore. But then she also says to Taylor Lautner, like, I gave you that look at the party because I was hoping you could kick him in the head.

And then he's like, what do you mean? And she's like, I live next door to you. I watch you doing that shit with your dad. Which is also just a very bizarre dynamic of just like, okay, we live next door to each other. We don't talk that much. I watch you doing weirdly aggro physical training with your father. I imagined if I gave you the nod, I could perhaps unleash you attack dog style. I'm reading, look, this is sad, sort of, but like this is a quote from a Taylor Lautner profile.

It took a long time to decide what the first movie outside the franchise was going to be. I wanted it to be special. You go with your passion and what your gut tells you. I mean, the quotes these people are giving is about a different movie like singleton in that piece is like this is it this is that first starring role people don't know to expect from taylor and when they see it they're going to be like whoa i get that you have to sell your movie there's no way anyone watched the rough cut of abduction and was like he's burning up the screen i can't believe

this like you know i you know i this denzel whittaker denzel whittaker plays uh his his pal right his friend uh probably known best for playing forrest whittaker young forrest whittaker in black panther despite not being related to forrest whittaker despite having the name whittaker anyway by the way play forrest whittaker's son in the great debaters a film directed by denzel washington he is related to neither of them yes um uh let me explain the pandemonium that taylor has he has like three to four hundred fans coming out each and every day showing up with posters showing him love uh the cool thing about him is he loves his fans he's humble about it hollywood hasn't gotten to him that's the type of dude he is we like you know he's just like

everyone seems to like the guy like every everyone is giving these quotes that are basically like he's friendly he's he's sweet like he's not being changed by this insanity or whatever. Like, I don't know. It's, it's, it's just sort of, it's a, it's a bummer that, that there's, there's absolutely nothing in this movie that I can speak for. He's kind of boring and he's a bad actor.

I mean, but it also, I mean, let's, let's point out, there's also this quote for him where he's talking about like what he wants to do in his career. Right.

And he's saying like, my dream is to continue to challenge myself in a wide variety career right and he's saying like my dream is to continue to challenge myself in a wide variety of roles and genres i like having fun with comedy so like valentine's day funny or die snl he does a fucking funny or die video that's a field of around this time he has a little part in valentine's day i remember him being solid on snl like not great but like he was trying he was, he was not protective of his image, and that felt like, oh, he's, like, kind of charming when he's not flattening himself out trying to play a movie star, you know? And I feel like that also, to a certain degree, like Pattinson and Stewart both get really flattened out as those movies go along. And it took them until after the career to sort of get their mojo back.

And it feels like he permanently got kind of maybe just because he was so young and had done so much less work before it. But so caught up in that mode of just like it's your angles. It's how to do like the right kind of grimace you know like just how to hold your close-up i mean i watching this movie it feels like his motivation in every scene is be a movie star as opposed to any sort of trackable psychology of what this character is going through and the character is admittedly going through a fucking lot going through a lot but reacting to none of it and the script isn't really let i guess the script is letting him i don't know my deep question is if anyone is good in this movie like as i as i

said before like you know if there's the good people have nothing to work with yeah and i think sigourney is the best and she's got the least to do in a way. Like if Pattinson is in this movie, and I don't think Pattinson was even the actor, he's become a better actor. You know, like it's not like he was absolutely ready to just sort of coast on charm in 2011. I mean, in the Twilight movies, he looks like he wants to die. Right. Remember me, Pattinson is more compelling

than Abduction Lautner. Is Kristen Stewart better? Yes. Like, is he better? Yes. Does that make the movie good? No, no. I mean,

it would be, it would be a shit. Dermot Mulroney's lips are in this. They sure are. Can we talk about the choice? I recognize them. Can we talk about the choice of just never revealing? Why would you book Dermot Mulroney nathan's father and have shoot his lips only

and then not reveal that he is the father it's a guy with a distinctive voice and distinctive lips too i recognized his lip i so is it the swagger of a movie that's like, baby, this is part one. Like, get ready for abduction. Abduction two. Reabduction. You know, like, get ready. Yeah, we have Mulroney in this for a second because he's, you know, signed for three more. It's like, is it like Alita having Edward Norton at the end?

But David, that's the whole point. I would buy that if it was Edward N norton revealed as his father like no disrespect to dermot mulroney who's an actor i like a lot but he is not someone where the audience is going to go oh shit if you reveal him okay but i don't want to be rude to dermot mulroney who we are now bagging on despite we all like his lips we all like his but do you think they were like let's get a big actor they called 40 actors who were like what no and then moroni was like sure yeah okay what it's a day it's an hour of work fine like and maybe i'm in the next one okay let's also acknowledge that that thing almost never works like when edward norton shows up at the end of alita people

go who is that? Like, is that Edward Norton? Am I supposed to know who that character is? You don't really recognize him because he looks weird in it. Another example of this is Cillian Murphy being inexplicably in one scene at the beginning of Tron Legacy. And you're like, okay, so is he supposed to be the villain in the next

one? He's overqualified for this. Johnny Depp in Fantastic Beasts is maybe the best of that and and that's a disaster they they shackled themselves to him like not only that you have a good guy giving a good performance the whole fucking movie and then the twist at the end is now here's a shittier person but i mean that the fantastic beast thing is a good call because it's like the confidence that movie has with like, you don't even know. Colin Farrell is A, but we've got an A plus lister and it's Johnny Depp.

And everyone's like, oh, no, God, this is like now we're stuck with him. He has to be in like four more of these. Is it Mickelson is doing it now? Correct. The look is so bad. Yeah, the look is so bad. I think we made the joke that it looks like he was given five minutes to rummage around in a costume film before filming he's like one eye is weird uh earring i mean the alita thing is a good one because like my wife loves edward norton like anything

and that's all she leaves the movie it was like why was edward norton there what's he doing where is why will there be more edward norton why was like, why was Edward Norton there? What's he doing? Will there be more Edward Norton? Why was there not more Edward Norton? It always just ends up either feeling like a tease or being distracting and confusing. Abduction. This is a bad movie. Guys, we are out of things to talk about with abduction. Yeah, it's a terrible thing.

Right? Yes. I'm trying to think if there any literally anything else um yeah it's it's really terrible i i just wanted to call out a few fun things you know it's it's please it's absolutely it's superfluous now to just bag on plot holes but i but i feel that i must uh i love the fact that one of the way that the way that nathan confirms that he is that child is he finds the exact shirt he was wearing on the day he was abducted in his basement the pair the kevin and mara kevin and mara kept it for some reason they didn't destroy it away

it's got the stain the same stain that's visible on it i love that i love the fact that when he's fighting the assassin on the train as the guy's got his hands around his throat nathan then hears his father's voice you gotta dig deep you know you gotta come on now you can do this and he's calling what he's doing in that moment is calling back to the times that his father would beat his ass in the front yard like that's the inspiration he's calling on well and also like not to fucking compare a better version of this movie in a way again but like hannah yeah spends so much fucking time with eric banna in isolation training this girl right like it gives you a lot of time to really build that relationship the question of of, like, who is she? Why is she so shielded from the world?

And really selling you that once shit hits the wall, she knows how to cope for herself. You believe that Saoirse Ronan can fight all these fucking people because you've seen the degree to which she's trained. Whereas this is just like, I don't know. The level of training Jason Isaacs does for Taylor Lautner in this movie reminds me of my dad trying to teach me how to toughen up because kids were mean to me at school. Come on, come on. Hit me here and then here. Right. Like, this was like shit my dad would make me do to be like, you should know how to box.

And I was just like, I don't know. Please let me watch cartoons. Casting Isaacs and having him just have that material, again, speaks to like a Hitchcock movie that's not there. Where there's 40 minutes of like, what's up my dad jason isaacs has a creepy vibe like no offense jason isaacs he's good at playing that like do i trust this guy you know like he's good at that and instead no forget it don't tell me that he's actually good and then kill him immediately and then have a movie left an hour hour left. I mean, yeah. Like, it's the biggest...

This movie would be completely... We would never speak of it had Singleton not made it. Yes. No. Correct. It's one of the most anonymous movies we've ever covered on this show. It would be like, you know,

what is the knockoff version of Mark Wahlberg's Sniper? It's like that kind of action movie but like the c level version of that b level b minus right of a exactly like of an action movie that you barely remember yeah and like you know that we've gone through in the over you know obviously the luke cage movie like the the many movies that like uh singleton was attached to like eight the a team the one that jj dug up that i'd forgotten about he was at one point supposed to direct a wheel man because singleton was considering several video game adaptations he almost did what's the the snoop dog one called uh the fear and respect is the Snoop Dogg one, yes. But he almost did Wheelman, which was Vin Diesel's video game when Vin Diesel wanted to become a multimedia artist.

Which, of course, he became. Right, which was supposed to be a proof of concept for a movie and never happened, but the game's fun. Right. What's up with the Wheelman? Oh, rules. He's a fucking cool guy and he drives cars. Vin Diesel had the idea in 2009. I thought he was like a tire muon or something.

No, he was like, what if I made a franchise about me driving cars? But just look at—J.J. pull up some more specifics here. Singleton files the $20 million lawsuit against Paramount in 2011, right? The same time—the same year that this movie comes out rather and then paramount uh countersued uh he claimed that they reneged on the deals by adding extra conditions that made uh his uh terms impossible to fulfill and it became what the hollywood reporter called the chicken or the egg controversy which was did Singleton have to complete two films to get Paramount's distribution

guarantee or did Paramount have to guarantee distribution to get Singleton to complete the two films it's like fucking Brazil Harry Tuttle bullshit that they caught him up with and he claims that the two things he was supposed to do were a

Tracy that he was supposed to produce rather to fill the deal. Aside from all the movies they didn't let him direct were Tracy Morgan concert film directed by Spike Lee and a D. Ray Davis movie, which would have been him doing another sort of mentoring a young filmmaker. And they ended up settling at the final year, the following year, rather, for less than 20 million dollars. the final year, the following year, rather, for less than $20 million. But, you know, I think, I've talked about it in several episodes, but Shane Salerno wrote a really interesting obituary for him on Deadline when he passed away,

and he talked about how he just kind of got so fucking pissed off at the industry after that. He bought a boat. He loved the water and was like, I don't know, man, I just want to sail around i i forgot about the other there is one other project that the tupac movie that that i think that's the one that really broke him because obviously he knew tupac yeah he tupac was in his movies he was attached to make the tupac movie and like whatever was forced out because of creative differences and like got on instagram was like, people don't take him seriously.

They're trying to fuck up his legacy. And John Singleton making a Tupac movie seems like a slam dunk. It's pretty weird. And of course, that movie, Carl Franklin got signed and then Benny Boom made that movie that is god awful and still made money because people were just like there's a tupac movie like i want to see that like remember when that movie like didn't screen it for critics they like dumped it in theaters and it like made like 50 million dollars because people were like cool like there's a tupac movie and like imagine if singleton had gotten to do that before he died at least i i'm gonna get the numbers wrong here but i remember being with you getting bagels after recording a podcast episode on like a friday or a saturday morning

right and i pulled up deadline and i went like the tupac movie made 20 million dollars opening day and you and i were like is this thing a blockbuster and then it made like 30 million for the weekend right it dropped off fast but people you know showed up for yeah yeah i mean for for the worst execution of that right and then after this he does he does this 30 for 30 episode which is not much loved but he does his episode of uh people versus oj which is arguably the best i think of that series and then that gets him back in the FX fold. He sets up Snowfall and he was pushed off of Snowfall within the first season. He was fired off of that show before he passed away. Is that true? It's interesting. I mean, Snowfall is still on, right? Do you guys want,

has anyone seen Snowfall? Jason, have you seen? I have not watched it. It's one of the, people talk about it. People are people are like oh snowfall kind of got good like i don't know i i don't know anything about it apart from that it's you know set in la and the crack epidemic like you know that's i just know it's sort of a broadly you know historical show that's all i know i i'm trying to find the timeline on this because uh i feel like people often talk about now like like, well, he had set up Snowfall. If he had still lived, he still would have been doing Snowfall. But I vividly remember the Deadline story that was like, there's a new showrunner now. He directed the finale of season two, though.

So he at least... Interesting. Yeah, I don't know. He was involved until he died, basically. Maybe he was just deprived. He was... I don't know i i think he had more control over it at some point pushback maybe it was after season two i'm gonna find this while we talk about

other shit um but yeah that's it jason i didn't even ask you like singleton in general are you a fan like you know how do you feel about his other movies uh I am a big fan of John Singleton. I mean, obviously, Boys in the Hood is a... That's an iconic... That's an iconic... Legitimately an iconic film that's important to me. It's important to many people. And it's kind of a touchstone in cinematic history for people our age.

And it's a shame. it's a shame that this is his last movie too fast too furious i like it it's not that you know four brothers i had fun with i like his i like his movies he's got this two-chunk career it's like you know the his first chunk is these serious movies that are all at least interesting and some of them are fantastic and then the second half is shaft shaft i saw in the theater i liked it you know yeah you know shaft too fast too furious four brothers but you know like where it's like yeah he's making genre movies he's making action movies he's he's good four brothers has good action like too fast has good action the action in this stinks i don't know if it's a taylor launder problem i don't know if it's a budget

problem i don't know if it's a prep problem but like the action in this is pretty like you know i could i mean your eye just slides off the screen it's just it's just that kind of a movie where you're just like what else is going on yeah griffin said inert uh earlier and and and that is the case there is i again yeah i have no idea what happened none of us do but i But it really feels like one of those situations where there was just simply too many voices. Like, obviously, one of the big goals of this movie was to launch Taylor Lautner as a film star. I'm sure John Singleton came into this with some other ambitions that he wanted to do. this with with some other ambitions that he wanted to do uh it seemed like the studio was was you know hinging their their economic future on the success of this movie there was just a lot of masters that this film was trying to serve and it ended up serving all of them extremely poorly

it also feels like this movie doesn't want to make a single specific choice. And a thing to consider is here's John Singleton. He's had this bizarre career arc, right? He's still a fucking young dude. He makes Too Fast, Too Furious, which is kind of like roundly mocked by everyone. Shaft, which is supposed to start a franchise and doesn't, right? Then Four Brothers, which is supposed to get a sequel and doesn't but was sort of seen as something of a comeback for him um and then uh you know the hustle and flow thing give him this boost and then he's just stuck sitting on a bench for five years i think it

was so fucking frustrating for him that this was truly just like a movie to get made to get himself back out there because it truly isn't a stupid fucking industry like it's idiotic industry it's it's it's the you know what have you done lately shit we're like if you just haven't worked in a little while people assume that something must be wrong and i think he felt like he needed to break the curse in some way and and clearly and clearly listen, you know, uh, you mentioned Carl Franklin earlier, Carl Franklin,

great director, Carl Franklin, one false move is as taught and as knife said, a thriller as, as you can come up with. Uh, and that's a guy who basically, other than Devil in a Blue Dress,

which came out kind of after that, really just kind of like dropped off the map in terms of like an awareness of his films. So I would imagine being a black director in Hollywood is somehow mixed in this formula because the idea that John Singleton would ever struggle in his career after coming out of the gates the way he did uh is is really honestly kind of crazy yeah look here's another

thing that must have been infuriating to singleton this movie comes out in 2011 it's the same year as fast five yeah right he's watching this franchise that people say he killed now becoming like the franchise and not only that but like fast five is the one where they're reintegrating the characters that he developed the actors that he cast the franchise is starting to come back around start to reintegrate some of the cartoonishness that he was the first to put in exactly yeah right i think that must be super fucking frustrating to him i think he's seeing all these guys that he launched who are still working at like a big level right uh and i i don't know i mean you talk about like the carl franklin thing carl franklin had you know this big indie movie right and then he had this like

good the fucking movie star thriller but singleton came out the gate with like a fucking culture-defining movie yes he's getting reported on mtv news you know he's like a youth icon yes he's a box office and he's fucking awards and he's all this shit he never was going to be able to fly under the radar and i think to some degree he probably felt the weight of being john singleton everything needing to be a john singleton movie and he talked about how he wanted to make junkier movies and thrillers and shit because he didn't want to be boxed in. He wanted to make sci-fi movies. He wanted to make comic book movies.

He wanted to do all this different sort of shit. And then he got stuck in this fucking rut. I want to correct myself here. The Snowfall thing, which I remembered, is they shot the pilot, which Singleton directed and wrote, and then FX, before picking up the show, demanded reshoots, rewrites, and cast changes, and he was not rewriting or directing the reshoots. So in my mind, I was like, oh, he was pussed off the show, but then he stayed on it. I think he had all controlling power at the beginning and then became one of the people Billy Magnuson was one of the people he cast at the

beginning who was then recast Billy Magnuson's good right but I don't know the whole the Singleton thing is odd I mean this is a thing if people don't remember he was 51 years old when he died he's 40 whatever he's in his early

40s when he makes this movie. Like, some people, that would be the first time they get to direct. They'd be in their 40s. Like, you know. There's eight years in between this movie and his death. And there's, like, a lot of time wasted. Yeah, I know. Right.

That's a bummer. And, look, the Chancellano thing, he talks he talks about how he just like loved the ocean, gotten his boat all day, read comic books, went and would go see movies with his friends. And the last couple of years he was feeling a little bit re energized, re energized rather. And he was starting to reach out. And we've seen reports of this of shit with like him reaching out to Tyrese and Taraji and saying, like, maybe it's time for some kind of follow up. You know, he was starting to kind of poke at things a little bit. It feels like, inevitably,

there would have been some second wind for him. David. Yeah. Did you see this thread posted on our Reddit by, full credit here, a user named WeGottaGoFast1138, which is a good username. or if i did what's the threat the threat is and this is a really kind of heavy thing to consider okay the threat is what

every blank check director's last film would have been if they passed at john singleton's age so this is to consider in terms of how young he was and the fact that he started so goddamn young that he got this many films made, okay? Here is every director we've covered and how their career would have ended if they died at John Singleton's age. M. Night Shyamalan, old. Wow.

Rip. Wow. The Wachowskis, Jupiter Ascending. Sure. Cameron Crowe, Elizabethtown. Ouch. James Cameron, Aliens of the Deep. Steven Spielberg, Amistad.

Nolan Tennant. Catherine Bigelow, K-19, The Widowmaker. So there's your first example of someone who makes their definitive movie after the age. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Okay. Paul Verhoeven, Roboc age. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Okay. Paul Verhoeven,

Robocop. Damn. He was Singleton's death age when he made his first American movie. James L. Brooks, Broadcast News. Wow. Brad Bird, Ratatouille,

Ang Lee, Brokeback Mountain, Nancy Meyers, What Women Want, her second movie. Wow. Tim Burton, Corpse Bride.

Well, that's kind of depressing to consider. Michael Mann, Last of the Mohicans. Wow. Yeah, he was old. He's, I mean, yeah, he got started late, obviously. Hayao Miyazaki, Porco Rosso. Wow. Demi, Philadelphia.

George Miller, Lorenzo's Oil. Nora Ephron, This Is My Life, her first movie. Gina Prince-Bythewood is now the same age as Singleton when he died the old guard Zemeckis Castaway Musker Clements Treasure Planet Elaine May Mikey and Nikki wow it's look he died too young it's a mindfuck

obviously he was 51 years old Griffin let's play the box office game for abduction Jason you don't want to talk about the plot or Yeah. Griffin, let's play the box office game for Abduction. Jason... Wait, you don't want to talk about the plot or revisit anything else in the movie Abduction? Jason, this movie came out

September 23rd, 2011. And I'm going to... Griff's going to try and guess the top five at the box office this week. Abduction opened number four, which is not great because there are four box office this week. Abduction opened number four, which is not great because there are four movies opening this week. And it's not the highest opener.

It opened to $10.9 million. It grossed $28 million domestic. Yeah. $86 million worldwide. Yeah, when they say $96 million, they're including video sales. Oh, boy. It was not a hit. The movie did not. was it was not a hit the movie the movie but it was not

an egregious flop because it did not cost that much right exactly yes it was cheap to make but also that's very telling if they're including video sales to juice up their total and it still wasn't a hundred million doesn't hit a hundred uh, though, at the box office is a movie that came out 902 weeks ago. David. That's 15 years. Yes. So it's a re-release? Mm-hmm.

Of a famous movie. Is it the 3D Lion King? It's the 3D Lion King. $21 million. Wow. I mean, and this is its second weekend? It's its second weekend. It came out the weekend before. People went to see that shit. I didn't see

that shit. Look, David, people like to clown on old Griffey Nooms, but when I predicted that the fucking Jon Favreau Lion King would be the highest grossing film in history, it was largely because Yeah, I was, but I just want to say the data that was heavily factoring into

my prediction was this was like a bizarrely successful re-release it made another 90 million dollars people love the lion king they love that lion king that one's good and also it like exploded overseas the 3d re-release in a lot of uh territories where movie going had not been as big yeah but i mean griffin here's the thing the shitty awful lion king remake that looks like shit made 1.6 billion dollars right did great right so you can say dumb prediction griff but that's how much money that movie fucking you were saying were saying it was going to do better than Avatar. I want to remind you that I made that prediction before there was a single image released. I know.

My prediction only looked foolish when we knew the movie would look like a bowl of farts. We didn't know that at the time. It was a no guts, no glory prediction. Yeah, yeah. Lion King 3D, huge hit. Lion King 3D. Okay, so number two.

Disney started re-releasing all the other things to 3D and no one went to any of them other than me no one cared right the Phantom Menace 3D I saw that number two is new this week is a great movie that has only I feel like grown as like a cable classic as sort of

an art movie classic it's a sports film it's a best picture nominee it's like there's nothing like this movie there's no sports movies it's money ball oh wow i mean one of my favorite movies in the last 10 years yeah like how many sports movies that like could could also play on fucking tnt oh and play at the metrograph and be an Academy Award nominee. I think that movie is a fucking masterpiece and my three least

favorite subjects in the world are sports, numbers, and money. Jason, Moneyball? Do you like Moneyball? I love Moneyball. I think it's a great film. I think it does something really magical, which is make something that is so fucking boring numbers and

baseball yeah into a you know like that kind of everything you know about this is wrong kind of triumphant triumphant underdog yeah rationality it's both emotional and cinematic and you hear the stories about like the version that sodeberg was trying to do and it was like this and like bananas like there's a cartoon clippy on screen breaking right and like david justice plays himself all the stuff like that right like it would have been like the laundromat a movie i only i like right and then somehow fucking bennett miller figured out a way to make this thing work as like kind of a classic seventies, new Hollywood movie.

So good. So money ball opening, big doing well, kicking abductions ass opening to $20 million. Still. I mean, still getting whooped a little bit like Simba, but sure.

Yes, it's true. Not, not knocking off Simba. Number three is an inspirational movie um animal movie also new this week also kicking abduction's ass it's a

live action animal movie it's not it's not dolphin tail is it it is dolphin wow wow dolphin tail is a fucking sleeper because it's opening number three and it goes all the way to 100 million dollars right it was one of those word of mouth inspirational Dolphin Tale was a fucking sleeper because it's opening number three and it goes all the way to $100 million. Right.

It was one of those word of mouth, inspirational, yeah. Word of tail. Connick Jr., Ashley Judd. Yeah. Morgan Freeman's got a hat on the poster. David, I said- And a bow tie. I said word of tail.

Word of tail. Yeah, thank you. Right. So the dolphin doesn't have a tail, right? That's what it's about? Right. They have to build a robot tail for the dolphin so he can go back in the water. In the dolphin tale, too, he falls in love with a different dolphin, I think.

Charles Martin Smith directed those movies. Right. The guy from The Untouchables, right? Yeah. Yeah. Right? Yeah. All right.

Number four is Abduction. Number five, also new this week. Whoever decided to open this against abduction idiotic another action movie that no one remembers um what can i tell you about this movie it stars a multiple oscar winner whoa is it the gunman nope um that's a good guess star come on you gotta give me credit it's that kind of movie it's that kind of movie so it's a post neeson should we get other highbrow actors to be in an action movie no it's three actors it's like action star oh oscar winner and then kind of in between yes oh i hold on i'm gonna be able to name the three actors before i remembered the title of the film

okay please this is the one that has like de niro statham yes and then the third guy fuck he he's like a fair he like a not james bond like he's like a clive owen you know clive owen yes yeah and it's not called it's not called like hunt to kill right no although the tagline is may the best man live so my guess is they're they're against each other i don't know uh the movie is called killer elite oh killer elite right killer elite jason have you seen killer elite i have i've seen i've seen a few minutes on kill of killer elite i believe killer elite is streaming on amazon. I might be wrong about that. Everything you just said sounds right.

You've seen it streaming on something. Right? Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, look. Killer Elite. When a mentor is taken captive by a disgraced Arab sheikh, a killer for hire is forced into action to kill... This sounds convoluted.

He has to kill three members convoluted he has to kill uh three members of the sas responsible for the death of his sons i don't get it so there's a fourth guy too dominic purcell is in this movie uh old potato head from uh prison break you know everyone knows yeah i'm sorry uh this movie is also written uh based on a novel called the feather man written by sir ranoff fines yes who in addition to being uh cousins to uh uh wraith and joseph fines also in 1984 was crowned by the guinness book of world records the world's greatest explorer what yeah if you if you grew up in britain you know who Randall Fiennes is. He's an explorer. The man explores.

He's done, or he's fucking gone all over the world. He's one of those guys. He's like the oldest guy. I think he's the oldest guy to climb Everest, or one of those things. Entirely on foot! He was the first one. Is that right? Yes, he's the first

to completely cross Antarctica on foot. Why would you do that? That sounds so boring. And then he climbed Mount Everest at 65. And then he sold off the rights to his book so they could make Killer Elite based on a true story. Let me read this incredible factoid for you from the Wikipedia of The Feathermen, the novel, number one bestseller written by Randolph Fiennes. Here's the short thing about the plot. The book tells the story of four British Army soldiers, including two members of the SAS, who were assassinated by a hit squad known as the Clinic.

The murders are carried out over a 70-year period on the orders of a Dubai sheikh whose three sons were killed by british forces in oman during a battle with the communist guerrillas here's the great part fines rannell fines claimed that he himself was targeted by the group the clinic but was savage but was saved by a group of vigilantes calling themselves the feather men this novel written by raniennes based on a true story. How does that get turned into this fucking movie? Serena Fiennes. Also, I just I kind of can't get over winning being crowned by Guinness the world record for something that is arguably an opinion. It's not,

he is the most, it's, he, we, he is officially the world's greatest explorer. I'll say this about, about Randolph Fiennes and his, and,

and admittedly, I have not looked into the claims that he is the world's greatest explorer, but I'll, I'll just say that, uh, I feel like if nothing is named after you how can you be the best you know what i mean like uh uh the colonialism was terrible the age of european expansion throughout the 17th 18th 19th century people walking around being like this is my

mountain it's called totally awful but they did go there and they got stuff named after them yes and after that there was not that much else to find ran off finds no yeah i don't think he could be maybe greatest living ex but no come on no i don't think so also when you're the third most famous fine yes do you think he's second? Do you think he beats out Joseph? Where's Joseph these days? There's even hero Tiffin finds now. That's true. I believe it's finds Tiffin. Okay, fine.

You mentioned that he climbed Everest. Again, there is another mountain not named after him that he climbed. Yeah, that's true. How good could he possibly have been? Maybe he has some little mountain we don't know he probably doesn't is he still he's still alive 77 years old amazing i just feel like joseph maybe has him isn't joseph finds in like he's on the handmaid's tale or whatever yeah he's leaped ahead again now you think that like after a while he was down but then

he was like, I got this Hulu show. Right. It's got some real energy. Around running with scissors, Randolph was running circles around Joseph. When they were doing the canceled Michael Jackson TV episode, Randolph had Joseph beat,

but now I think Joseph's pulled ahead again. I forgot about the Michael. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Can we remind people that existed there was there was an announced episode of a british tv show that was going urban myths i believe it was called yes right that was about uh marlon brando elizabeth taylor and michael jackson all getting in a car together after 9 11 is that correct? Yes, that is correct. And Joseph Fiennes was playing Michael Jackson.

I want to say Stockard Shannon was playing Elizabeth Taylor. Correct. And Brian Cox is Marlon Brando, which sounds good. And it was produced and then never, ever, ever shown. They finished filming it and people protested every single element of it i have to do this now i have to make it my background one second i have to because i forgot that an image leaked out of joseph fines as late michael jackson you know who could forget when that leaked on the internet it's so much worse than i remember it being. It's truly, truly terrible.

I mean, when you're going to look like that, why even be in it? You don't look like Joseph Fiennes anymore. Like anyone could look like that. He looks like Pinocchio. You're right. It's so bizarre. Griff, I think we're done.

The only other thing is, Griff, do you have a Singleton ranking? It's only nine movies, but do you have your Singleton list? Oh, fuck. I didn't prepare. It's the end of Singleton. I can do it off the dome.

I did find something that was named after Fiennes. Oh, great. Go ahead. Yes. I just sent it into the chat. You can take a look. Let me see. Sent it into the chat.

Serenoff finds on the adventures that inspired his rum so there you go okay oh serrano finds his great british rum that's the name it's called oh man and on the rum bottle it's like him going across the antarctica it's it's he's all he's all furred up. This I don't know. It feels like as good a time as any to announce my new product launch. Griffin Newman's good American beer. Not great. It's fine. It's fine.

It's fine. God, I'd love to have a liquor. Jason, you should get a liquor. You should get like a brand. I'm not I'm not at that level yet, but I think it's an aspiration. it's certainly one that uh that uh you know that i think all of us share have you considered a vape flavor sure at least a vape flavor yeah that could be fun i i i think i i prefer flower i think you know i've read several conflicting things about how how healthy vape fluid is for you i wouldn't want to poison people but but i i'd be open to it if certainly if the number was was right blank check could have a

like a small batch ale you know i just will the the promo shoot you do where you like buy a big like sill you know like and you're like you're like you know talking to some old guy and he's like yeah that's where we put the you know the barley i i would yeah i also want i want us to have like a fucking casamigos photo where the three of us are on three motorcycles side by side with sunglasses with yeah anyway handing each other briefcases full of money um uh well what a great talk we've had here jason thank you so i mean we're gonna we're just gonna it was my it was absolutely my pleasure thank you for having me no i mean you've been uh requested as a guest one of the most uh one of the most requested guests for this show for for years and

uh when we settled on doing singleton and we saw this one we were like that feels like a good way to make that episode worth listening to that was our thought and you have succeeded on that front it's a magical movie and listen if if people want to sit uh and watch a 90 minute movie that is completely unexciting and indeed uh often baffling uh check it out the taylor Lautner vehicle abduction 2011 RIP John Singleton rip rip unfortunately Jason is there anything you want to plug listen to Take Line

on Crooked Media it comes out every Tuesday watch All Caps NBA on the Take Line YouTube channel that comes out every Friday that's it be good to each other out there well that's a huge plug be good to each other out there. Well, that's a huge plug. Be good to each other. And also, if you want to be good to yourself, remember to rate, review, and subscribe.

Blank check on all wherever you listen to podcasts. You can follow us at Blank Check Pod on Instagram and Twitter. Thank you to Marie Barty for our social media. Thank you to Alex Barron and A.J. McKeon for our editing. Leigh Montgomery and the Great American Novel for our theme media. Thank you to Alex Barron and AJ McKeon for our editing. Lay Montgomery and the Great American Novel for our theme song. Thank you to JJ Birch

and Nick Floriano for research. You can go to blankies.reddit.com for some real nerdy shit and go to our Shopify page for some real nerdy merch and go over to

the Blank Check Patreon, patreon.com slash blank check, where we do blank check special features, franchise commentaries, finishing up our hot Tay summer with the Twilights. Will we have announced what's next at this point, or is that still a surprise? No, no, no, no, we're not.

So we're in the middle of the breaking dawns right now. I think people will be very, very happy with that. But the last two, especially the last breaking dawn episode i think is uh really really good uh now we should we should throw out because the schedule is going to be a little a little interesting for the next couple of weeks because yeah john carpenter our march madness winner will be our mini series for the fall it's going to be a fucking barn burner we got great

guests lined up and obviously just a killer killer selection of movies but those are great but there are a couple new release films coming out in july that we need to cover because of past episodes and because of that we need to do two episodes to fill the gap between our new releases. So should we just say everything we're doing right now? Sure. These are our plans. We're doing another... Well, go ahead. Go ahead. Okay. First up, July 11th. It's been a while. It has been a while since a Ben's Choice. So it's time for another one. And Ben, of course, picked a movie that David immediately identified is not just a Ben's Choice, but is perhaps a Hosley Manifesto. That's right.

We're doing a classic film, a film I love, called Joe Dirt. Joe Dirt. Joseph Dirt. Joseph Dirt. Yes, we love him and and then on uh july 18th uh a a long promised episode we're finally getting to uh last summer tom sharpling donated thousands of dollars to charity uh for the good on him good on him uh for the fundraisers we did on the George Lucas talk show. And he often would ask for some sort of prize or punishment in exchange for the money he donated,

such as making me drop a pastrami sandwich off of my fire escape. But one time what he asked for was a second reckoning with a film that perhaps we did not investigate thoroughly enough in one episode alone. that perhaps we did not investigate thoroughly enough in one episode alone. So we are going back to the well and doing another episode on the Martin Short movie, Clifford. Yeah.

It is... A former Ben's choice. Thrilled about this. It is Clifford 2, Hyper Clifford, a sequel to our first episode about Clifford. Yeah, so that's next after joe dirt that's right and then there are two new movies to talk about space jam a new legacy which looks great yep it looks perfect doesn't look like there's anything fucked up about that no absolutely

not the cinema is still alive the movies are back space jam a new legacy my brother jamesy newman coming back for that one. And then August 1st, we're talking Sean Millan. We're talking old. Marie Barty is going to make her first main feed appearance on the show. Yep. Then we'll start Carpenter and Hold to Transylvania 4.

We got pushed back, so that will happen mid-Carpenter. I'm so excited for Carpenter, you guys. It's going to be great, Jason. It's going to be so fun. It's going to be fucking fun. It's going to be fun. It's going to be great, Jason. It's going to be fun. And look, Singleton's been a fun journey. I'll say it's weird because, you know,

we usually record episodes months and months and months in advance, right? And we were banking up an absurd amount of episodes in advance of you and your wife having a child david true and then uh during your paternity leave i started dealing with health issues and our getting back into recording schedule was uh was slow and very gradual and so this has been a very drawn out record we've spent like six months with singleton in our brains um because nine movies right we we kind of recorded all of musker and clements and may and the first half of singleton within like a month and then we the rest of the singleton episodes were very uh spread out um but

it's been a very interesting sort of like time to immerse ourselves in and sort of this kind of last URA in a way for like, uh, I don't know, real auteur careers within the studio system. Uh, and it's, it's sort of, uh,

I don't know. It, it, obviously there's the X factor of him dying so young, but, uh, it, it does kind of presage.

I feel like what, uh, happened, uh, to the industry in general. And with that, shall we do our quick singleton rankings, David?

It's easy. I'll run it down for you right now. Boys in the Hood, number one. Rosewood, number two. Great movie. Baby Boy, number three.

Those two are kind of close for me. Both like very interesting, very good, not totally, you know, perfect movies. Then I have Poetic Justice at four and Too Fast at five four brothers at six

and then shaft higher learning abduction are fairly clear seven eight and nine for me you're probably different griff you like higher learning more than yeah i mean here's the bananas thing i'm gonna do number one is boys in the hood my number two favorite is higher learning i'm a lunatic arrest me send me to jail that's weird um higher learning number two then i would go hmm i think i go baby boy and then rosewood but those are pretty much split for me i obviously want to acknowledge that higher learning is a more inherently flawed movie than rosewood or baby boy but i love it and it kind of for me is like the purest kind of uncut singleton movie then i go hmm then i go too fast then i go shaft then i go four brothers then i go abduction yeah four brothers love four brothers is fun

i look i like them all other than abduction yeah yeah me too yeah they're enjoyable movies to watch yeah yeah all right that's it goodbye john that's been our episode goodbye john it's been nice spending some time with you and as always thank you for having me it was wonderful it truly our honor and uh we'll have you on again sometime soon yeah man and just because i want to end singleton on a somewhat positive note yes this is such a downer shitty movie for his career to end on i want to just uh list some accolades that abduction received so end as always, as clearly outlined on the Abduction Wikipedia page, Abduction was nominated for a Golden Reel Award for Dialogue and ADR in a Feature Film. Okay, you say, perhaps that's not that great of an award. Most unnoticeable ADR.

Well, hold your horses. most unnoticeable ADR. Well, hold your horses. It did win the Teen Choice Award for Choice Movie and Choice Movie Actor. Jesus. In the genre of action. That's some payola right there. It was nominated for,

but didn't win, Worst Actor, Taylor Lautner. Sandler. Sandler beat him out. Twilight Saga, Breaking Dawn Part 1, right, Sandler bodied him for Jack and Jill

and my final note for the John Singleton miniseries I do want people to know that it didn't win but Abduction was nominated at the Golden Trailer Awards

Best Standee for a feature film.