Starring: Taylor Lautner, Marie Avgeropoulos, Adam Rayner
"The love triangle is sickening, the parkour is mundane and the final line of the film is too cheesy to handle. With the other two leads of the Twilight films both going on to do great things, Taylor Lautner is still yet to impress in the acting department."
Tracers is an action film starring Twilight hunk Taylor Lautner as a bike messenger named Cam who is in a lot of debt with the intimidating Chinese mafia. Cam decides to join a group that participates in parkour as a form of escapism after meeting mysterious Nikki (Marie Avgeropoulos), the only girl in the gang. Of course, the talented bunch are not what they seem, and poor Cam gets more than he bargained for; they take orders from boss Miller (Adam Rayner) and engage in illegal activity in exchange for money.
Incorporating parkour into a high-fueled action film is a fairly good idea; it could be done extremely well with the right balance of fast paced action sequences mixed with a decent story. This film however, doesn’t have this; it’s actually a shame that what could be the grounds for a great film was wasted on this tedious plot.
I know the film is centered on parkour, but there are too many scenes which include it and this becomes boring. The film opens with a sequence of parkour; yes, it sets the scene for the gritty New York streets, but wasn’t really needed, as there was no connection to the plot here. The characters of the film are clichéd and one dimensional; Cam is the typical good hearted boy who has gotten mixed up with the wrong people. At times, I felt like I was needlessly watching people jump around buildings just for fun; what the film needed was intensity, which at times it did have but it wasn’t enough to keep me entertained.
It’s not all bad – there are two chase scenes which are what I would expect from a film like this, one in which the group attempts to steal a hefty amount of cash from a gang, and the final sequence where Cam goes up against manipulative boss Miller. These two scenes show snippets of the good film it could have been, with impressive camera movements and enough tension to keep your eyes glued to the screen. These scenes aren’t enough to make it a film worth watching unfortunately; the plot is too simple and doesn’t include any mind breaking twists or turns.
The love triangle is sickening, the parkour is mundane and the final line of the film is too cheesy to handle. With the other two leads of the Twilight films both going on to do great things, Taylor Lautner is still yet to impress in the acting department.
