Taylor Lautner may not be a particularly talented actor, but you’ve got to give the guy credit for trying really hard to be a movie star. He landed a dream role when he was cast as the werewolf in the Twilight movies and has been doing everything in his power to convince the world he’s a superstar ever since.

His co-stars in that series have tried to establish their thespian credibility with roles in decidedly smaller films — Kristen Stewart went all wayward in Welcome to the Rileys while Robert Pattinson’s starring in a David Cronenberg film set for release next year. That’s probably a decent path to ensuring career longevity, but it’s just not what Lautner’s all about. He doesn’t need credibility. He’s got rock-hard abs and a million-dollar smile. This bro is a damned star, and he’s going to do everything in his power to keep it that way.

So for his first major starring role that doesn’t involve playing a sexy lupine with a heart of gold (and rock-hard abs, don’t forget), Lautner is going all-out action star in this week’s Abduction.

Lautner plays the titillatingly named Nathan, who is pretty great at life in general but feels, according to the trailer, like a stranger in his own life. The whole movie is a lesson in trusting your feelings, because as it turns out, he was kidnapped. The rest of the trailer suggests that despite a bunch of mysterious Eastern European men chasing him around and Sigourney Weaver showing up with balloons (never a good sign), he decides his best course of action is to go to a curiously well-attended Pittsburgh Pirates game and jump over escalators.

For someone whose fanbase is comprised almost entirely of 13-year-old girls, doing a movie about child abduction and fighting at baseball games is a wild choice. But maybe Lautner’s just a wild guy, who knows?

What I do know is that as ridiculous a human being as Lautner is, at this particular moment in human history I’d probably go see a movie he stars in before anything with Robert DeNiro. I am obviously, obviously not comparing Lautner and DeNiro’s careers. But while Lautner’s doing everything in his power (and again, with those abs he’s probably got a lot of power) to make people like him, DeNiro stopped trying decades ago.

In fact, over the past five years, having DeNiro’s name associated with a film pretty much guarantees disappointment. With a cast that includes Jason Statham and the international treasure Clive Owen, there’s still hope that Killer Elite might be badass as all hell. Statham’s a proven commodity in the action genre, and Owen proved he could hang with any of today’s top badasses in Children of Men, but having DeNiro play third wheel is just such a bummer. There are probably people who are looking forward to watching an old Italian-American man talk in an over-the-top New Yawk accent, but when a movie’s called Killer Elite I’d rather cut the crap and watch the elite killers kill in an elite fashion.

I’m not saying it would be better if Taylor Lautner was playing the bitter old Italian-American, I’m just saying that at least he’d try his damned hardest and it would be less insulting to the audience.

Elsewhere, I still can’t figure out if the title to the movie Dolphin Tale is meant to have a double meaning. It’s a movie that tells the tale of a dolphin getting a new tail, so probably, but the title is a grammatical mess no matter how I read it. I have no idea how it will stack up with Free Willy or The Whale Rider as far as movies about big-ass fish go, and the presence of both Ashley Judd and Harry Connick Jr. suggests it’s some sort of Hollywood-helping-the-unemployed project. But whatever, it’s Morgan Freeman saving a dolphin. You know you like that.

There’s some early Oscar buzz for Moneyball, but there’s even more noise about how Jonah Hill’s not fat anymore. Baseball fans know that Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt) is the guy who took all the magic out of America’s pastime by inventing a system of complex statistical analysis to evaluate player performance. Someone somehow thought that would make for an interesting movie, and critics are suggesting they were right. So what do I know? Math nerds who happen to like baseball haven’t had a good movie made for them in a while, so eat your hearts out guys.