The Commuter

If The Commuter feels a bit familiar, it's probably because Liam Neeson has made plenty of action films just like this one.  To make it all the more familiar, the film's director is Jaume Collet-Serra, who has helmed three previous Neeson action thrillers, very much like this.  Everybody has been here before, and they are obviously old pros at this stuff by now.  But it's not the familiarity that sinks the film this time around, it's how ludicrous and how much this movie stretches the realm of plausibility as it goes along.  I understand the value of a movie asking the audience to shut off their brains for a while, but sooner or later, I felt the urge to start fighting back against the film and turn my brain on.

Neeson plays Michael MacCauley, a former NY cop who has since become an insurance salesman in order to support his loving wife (an underused Elizabeth McGovern) and his college-bound son (Dean-Charles Chapman).  The film kicks off with Michael having a very bad day.  He is let go from his job because of corporate cutbacks, right as he is preparing to help pay for his kid to go to school.  He stops at a local bar to drown his sorrows, where he runs into two former friends from his days at the police force, who are played by Patrick Wilson and Sam Neill.  Given that these supposedly minor characters are both being played by well-known actors, expect them to have larger roles before the film is done.  To make Michael's day even worse, he has his cell phone stolen from him while he is waiting for the train to take him home.  All this, and he is still uncertain as to how he's going to tell his wife he lost his job today.

While on the train, Michael has a seemingly random encounter with a mysterious woman (Vera Farmiga) who offers him a hypothetical question that he quickly learns is all too real.  She tells him that there is someone on the train who "does not belong", and is going to get off the train on the very last stop.  Before that happens, he must find out who that person is, and tag them with a tracking device which will allow that person to be followed and killed due to information they are holding.  For Michael's actions, he will find $25,000 stashed away in a restroom on the train, with another $75,000 waiting for him if he pulls off the job successfully.  Michael is not sure what's going on, but he checks the restroom she mentioned, and sure enough, there's the money she promised she would be there.  Now Michael must make the decision on if he can really put someone's life he doesn't know in his hands.  Not only that, but whoever wants him to pull this job apparently has eyes everywhere, and can watch his every move.

The Commuter clearly wants to be a Hitchcock-style thriller with an ordinary man thrust into a life or death situation, as well as uncovering a conspiracy that reaches the government and law enforcement, and may just hold the lives of his family at stake.  But, Hitchcock at least understood how to play with his audience and keep them riveted.  This movie goes so implausible so quickly that it's impossible to get invested.  We can practically see the screenplay twisting and contorting itself to try to appear clever, when it really just needed to embrace its absurdity more in order to work.  To be fair, Neeson does a great job as usual about taking this stuff seriously and making it seem like this isn't beneath his acting talents.  But, this is definitely a case of him giving more effort than the material deserves.

The movie does throw in some lofty elements to its plot about shady government, the rich vs. poor mentality, and the economic crash of 2008, while the plot tries to keep us guessing with an element of paranoia, since Michael is not sure who on the train he can trust, especially since whoever is behind all of this is somehow watching his every move, and he constantly is getting threatening phone calls from the woman who started this whole mess, and tells him his own family will be killed if he does not pull off this job.  But honestly, despite all the plot, the movie is really just about Liam Neeson doing his action hero act, beating people up, and getting involved in elaborate fights and increasingly elaborate special effect set pieces.  If you've enjoyed similar movies he has done, you'll likely find something to like here.  But the movie never quite worked for me, and the sillier it got, the more I started to resist whatever goodwill it may have created early on.

The movie is also quite deadly serious.  I kept on waiting for the film to develop a sense of humor.  And while there are a couple funny lines, they actually don't show up until it's almost all over, which is far too late.  It's strange.  The Commuter is a movie that seems afraid to fly off the rails, when it literally does long before the third act comes around.

0 comments