Taylor Lautner last starred in the Bourne Identity/parkour joint Abduction, which earned a paltry $28 million domestically on a $38 million budget, leading Universal to oust him from their planned Stretch Armstrong movie. You’d think the Taylor Lautner-as-a-leading-man experiment might’ve ended there, but since Hollywood is nothing if not a faultless utopia built on infinite wisdom, they’re going to try this Taylor Lautner/parkour thing again. Terrible acting! Ten-year-old trends! Secondary characters in Twilight! This project really has everything.
FilmNation Entertainment’s “Tracers” will give Lautner plenty of opportunity to show off his physical prowess.
Well that’s good, because if it were a vehicle for his acting skills and rugged charm, it might be a long shoot.
The film is set in the world of parkour, the physical discipline that centers on moving efficiently around obstacles, be it by jumping, climbing or running.
Lautner will play Cam, a bike messenger in New York City, who is in debt to an organized crime gang. He gets introduced to parkour by a sexy stranger after he crashes his bike. [Yahoo]
I know I say this a lot, but that sounds like something I would’ve written here as a joke about shitty movie premises. Actually, if I was creating a fake shitty movie premise, this might be too on the nose. Also, a bike messenger who gets in trouble with the mob and has to do parkour? That sounds VERY familiar. You might remember a little movie called Premium Rush, the plot of which is “In Manhattan, a bike messenger picks up an envelope that attracts the interest of a dirty cop, who pursues the cyclist throughout the city,” and whose trailer I posted back in September with the label “BIKE PARKOUR.” So, rather than “a movie about a bike messenger set in the world of parkour,” I think it’d be faster to call this “Premium Rush set in the world of Alpacas.”