After a couple of years off the big screen Taylor Lautner has come back in an action film showing off the art and skill of parkeur. His skill in that department as well as that of the rest of the cast will leave you quite breathless. The film as a whole less so.

Lautner is cast as bicycle messenger who is into some deep debt with loan sharks in the Chinese mob. He's a lower middle class kid who has also gotten in trouble in the past and he's trying desperately to get out of debt, but having his bicycle ruined by a passing motorist has really put him behind the eight ball.

Lautner falls in with a group of parkeur enthusiasts and for an amateur he certainly picks it up. They also have a sideline in thievery and are headed by Adam Rayner who is somewhat mysterious and a Fagin like creature.

All I can say is that if Fagin had all his street urchins skilled in parkeur none of them ever would have been caught by the law. As it is they seem to have a charmed life, but Lautner is getting in deeper and deeper and he doesn't see a way out.

Of course in the end it all does work out with Lautner winning the heart and hand of Marie Avergerpoulos fellow Tracer. In fact the title of the film Tracers is what male parkeur practitioners are called.

The action sequences are great and I think Lautner is indicating what career path he has chosen for his film career. Martial Arts and parkeur films. Hopefully the next film will have a more coherent story.

TRACERS is another boring, kid-friendly thriller set on the bustling streets of New York. It feels like the guys who made it watched PREMIUM RUSH and decided to make their own version of that film, replacing the bike action with parkour. I love parkour, enjoy seeing it done to perfection in the likes of DISTRICT 13 and CASINO ROYALE, but it's very ordinary here. The stunts are good but the shaking camerawork in between the stunts spoils it a little. The film also suffers from the casting of the incredibly wooden and one-dimensional Taylor Lautner as the supposedly charismatic lead, as he has no depth here whatsoever. The plot involves him with the least-imposing gangster villains ever, and an interminable narrative structure that mixes in romantic dialogue and weak heist scenes. It only gets going in the final action scene, and by then it's thankfully nearly over.

The film starts off as Premium Rush as Cam (Taylor Lautner) is a Bike Messenger in New York who owes money to the Chinese mafia. He crashes his bike into Nikki (Marie Avgeropoulos) and through her he is introduced a group of slackers that use Parkour to pull off heists. He just needs to make sure he keeps out of Chinatown. So the movie quickly evolves into a knock off Fast and Furious type with acrobatics replacing cars.

Cam joins the gang, falls in love with Nikki, but there is mutual distrust between Cam and the leader of the gang.

Cam quickly develops his Parkour skills but his debt to the gangsters is spiralling out of control and the heists are getting riskier.

The film starts off brightly, gets dull very quickly, the plot is mundane and even the Parkour can get repetitive. Lautner is OK in the action scenes but the drama and romance angle is limp.