It's all very well being a werewolf but what serious career prospects can you possibly have? This is no doubt a question that Taylor Lautner has posed to himself once or twice of late.

For the last few years Lautner has starred in the Twilight franchise as buff third wheel Jacob. But with that film series now dead and buried (it certainly won't be missed) as far as filming is concerned, its stars are looking for gainful employment elsewhere in the acting world.

For his first foray outside of the dim-lighted series, the young Lautner has plumped for a pacy little action number.

On the outside Nathan Harper (Lautner) is just your average teen: he likes to hang out with his friends; he gets tongue-tied around the girl he has a crush on; and he enjoys rolling around the floor half-naked with other young men – as part of the school wrestling team. However he's haunted by a bad dream, one that leads him to pay regular visits to a psychiatrist, Dr Geri Bennett (Sigourney Weaver).

He gets lucky when he's partnered with the girl he has a crush on – his long term neighbour Karen (Lily Collins) – for a school project. But instead of it being about history or some major scientific breakthrough, the pair have to write a project on missing people.

This leads Nathan to stumble upon a website that lists a number of missing children, and offers a vague artist's impression of what they may look like now. At first Karen jokes with him about how one of the kids looks a little like him. When Nathan looks at some old pictures of himself though, he notices the similarities are too eerie to overlook. Things get weirder when he fishes out an old stained shirt he used to wear as a kid; the child on the missing website is wearing exactly the same shirt – with the same stains included.

With his head spinning, he starts to wonder whether or not he really was abducted, and if that was the case, who are those two people pretending to be his parents? He doesn't have much time to contemplate any of this new information because he suddenly finds himself running for his life – be it with Karen in tow – but who is he running away from exactly?

Oh my god Talyor, you're not gonna like this. It's says the iPad 3 is just around the corner. Why must they punish us early adopters so?!

As decisions go, Lautner made a pretty savvy one with this project. His adoring female fans should be happy enough, after all his top comes off and his chest of buff meat is on display within the first ten minutes. But instead of pouting a lot, he actually puts a lot of his muscle to good use as he finds himself fighting, running, and fighting some more throughout. Which are all far more preferable to him looking all moody and howling at the moon.

He's also lucky enough to have someone like John Singleton directing; unfortunately for Singleton, that luck doesn't flow both ways. Singleton has really struggled to make a film to match his impressive 1991 debut Boyz n the Hood. In fact this is the director's first film in six years (since the rather limp Four Brothers). And it looks like he's just happy enough to be working again.

Although he's gathered an impressive cast that includes Brits Jason Isaacs and Alfred Molina, the film suffers from a terribly poor script. Not only is the entire premise preposterous, but some of the dialogue, courtesy of debut feature writer Shawn Christensen, has about as much sparkle as a lump of coal.

Still, Lautner definitely does enough to put it out there that he's more than capable of filling the sporty shoes of an action hero, and the film acts as a credible stepping stone onto bigger and better things. It's just a shame that the same can't be said for director Singleton, whose career is looking the more likely to go missing.