1 star out of 5
The warning signs were all there. It’s a January release (as with the end of summer, a traditional dumping ground for shitty movies). The poster proclaimed, “From the director of The Shallows [which I awarded 2.5 stars] and Non-Stop [1.5 stars].” And it stars Liam “Anything for a Buck” Neeson, who ceded his last shred of self-respect a long, long time ago.
And yet, there I was in the theater lobby, saying, “One for The Commuter, please.” What can I tell you? I like trains a lot. And sometimes this sort of action thriller can be fun. For a while, I was actually enjoying this flick. “Better than Murder on the Orient Express,” I remember incorrectly thinking. And it genuinely looked good. Director Jaume Collett-Serra does have a strong visual eye, as previously evidenced in The Shallows. We do feel like we’re aboard a moving Metro-North train in real time, and as it speeds along the Hudson from Grand Central toward Cold Spring, there are some really lovely nighttime shots. Earlier, Serra does a nice job capturing the stressful redundancy of the commuting life.
For Liam Neeson’s titular commuter, the hamster wheel careens off its base when he meets New Jersey’s own Vera Farmiga (Norma Bates) on-board. Is this sexy woman flirting? No, wait, she has a hypothetical request of Neeson the ex-cop (will that résumé item possibly come in handy?!?) that suddenly becomes not so hypothetical. He has to find a, uh, stranger on the train, and will be paid handsomely in return. Having just been laid off from his insurance job, Neeson reluctantly agrees. The stakes increase dramatically when he learns that if he doesn’t complete the task, his wife and son will be, you know, taken. (Proud to say I have, at least, still not seen any of those movies.)
I remained invested in the story. It felt a little like a technology-lite episode of Black Mirror. Neeson calls his still-a-cop buddy Patrick Wilson to help him out of this mess. Wilson and Farmiga? Oh, if only this were The Conjuring 3 and they were riding a ghost train!
But then matters just started getting stupider and stupider and stupider, with no build-up of tension to offset the crumminess. I feel like the movie studio green-lighted a fairly compelling pitch and then never looked at the completed script. And for that dreadful piece of writing I will mostly blame Ryan Engle, who was also a co-writer of Non-Stop, which shares the same basic plot: Identify one of the passengers before something really bad happens. Which is just a lazy twist on the aforementioned Orient Express anyway.
The train chugs farther upstate, the movie getting worse and worse, Neeson repeatedly getting his ass kicked without other passengers really noticing (he goes underneath the train twice fer crissakes), screenplay ineptly meandering here and there, with a few laugh lines bombing miserably, and clever twists that are neither clever nor twisty. Give me the Darjeeling Limited, or Silver Streak, or Runaway Train, or Money Train, or even the Polar Express, but I beg you, Mr. Conductor, let me off The Commuter.
Jack Silbert, curator