On same old track

THERE are two certainties in the world of Hollywood action thrillers.

The first is that you never want to be a member of Liam Neeson’s family. The second is never mess with Liam Neeson.

Neeson seems to have fallen into a solid typecasting career, where he plays the same character in the same role in the same movie over and over and keeps picking up his paycheques.

Something of a career hardman, he frequently gets those “tough old bastard” roles, whether it is Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn in Star Wars, immortal ninja Ra’s Al Ghul in Batman, the unflinching Oskar Schindler in Schindler’s List, or Bryan Mills in three Taken movies.

Now in the new action thriller The Commuter, Neeson plays Michael, a retired cop who finds himself caught up in a dangerous conspiracy during his evening train ride home from work.

A strange woman sits in the seat opposite Michael and offers him $100,000 if he finds a certain person on the train and plants a tracking device on their bag. Simple, no questions asked. But that person will most likely die.

Of course Michael has his reservations about it, but when his new employer says Michael’s family will be killed if he doesn’t comply, well, suddenly it just feels like every other Liam Neeson movie from the past decade.

The three Taken movies have become such a film cliche now that I’m surprised Neeson can even play this kind of role straight any more. I heard someone else describe The Commuter as “Taken on a Train” and they were pretty much on the money.

Even the director of The Commuter, Jaume Collet-Serra, directed Neeson in action thriller Non-Stop back in 2014, which was kinda the

MARTAIN

same thing again, but on a plane. So there is a reason why The Commuter feels so derivative and cliched.

But at the same time, Collet-Serra is rather good at wringing a great deal of tension from surprisingly modest scenarios. Non-Stop actually did this rather well, and his 2016 thriller The Shallows created an utterly gruelling nailbiter with nothing more than a lone surfer sitting on a rock 200m from the beach being stalked by a shark.

And the same is true of The Commuter. For all its bog-standard plotting and cliched structure, this is actually a surprisingly tense thriller. Sadly, it never feels new or surprising or original, but the pacing is pretty tight and it held my attention captive for its entire run-time. But that’s about where the good stuff ends. While I admit I didn’t predict the final twists, I feel a but annoyed with myself for not figuring them out because they were foreshadowed so heavily earlier in the film. These clue-laden moments are so conspicuous as to be cringeinducing, and I was completely aware they were going to be the final pieces of the puzzle later on, it was just frustrating that I couldn’t get there in time.

And there is some absolutely awful camerawork here as well. Tight-framed, rapidedited shaky-cam is as much a cliche of this genre as anything else, and is to be expected these days, but it is employed so sloppily here it started to give me a headache. I missed the crucial moment of one fight scene because I was busy looking away from the screen.

Using this same technique to film a simple quiet conversation between two men sitting at a bar in the opening act remains a baffling decision to me. It was filmed like a scene from Fast and the Furious. Why?

And with huge names like Sam Neill and Vera Farmiga in the cast, doing so very little, even the casting seems like a wasted opportunity.

By the end, we are still not really any closer to understanding who this mysterious organisation is, and why they would go to so much trouble to set this up. And that matters: we have gone through this process of trying to figure out what’s going on, it would be nice to have some pay-off.

And the “I am Spartacus” scene made me laugh, shich I’m sure was not the intent.

We’ve seen this movie so many times now, the only hook now is to just accept that it is a cliche and wait to see what it does differently to make it thrilling again. And The Commuter doesn’t really do anything interesting enough to make it feel worth the trouble.

It is exciting enough, quick pacing, slick production and so forth, and not really a bad movie. It’s just a derivative pay cheque movie that looks like a thousand others — maybe wait for the Blu Ray.

is now showing at Village Cinemas, the State Cinema and Cmax, rated M. RATING: