NEESON’S RIDE GOES TOO WILD
As underwhelming as a commute
The tagline for the Liam Neeson Metro-North thriller The Commuter — “Lives are on the line” — feels like a missed opportunity. I would have gone with: “The quiet car is about to get loud.”
It’s been 10 years since Neeson’s unlikely reign as the movies’ best action hero began with Taken — the little Paris kidnapping that unlocked Neeson’s special set of skills. What has followed has been a decade of lean, blunt and glum thrillers (three Taken movies, Non-Stop, The Grey), anchored by the looming and still potent presence of Neeson.
Neeson has suggested that, at 65, he’s nearing the end of the line. So The Commuter, which reteams him for the fourth time
with Spanish director Jaume Collet-Serra, may be one of our last chances to see Neeson kick some butt.
The Commuter rides the same rail as his previous movies with Collet-Serra; it’s a hostage crisis tick-tock that speeds straight ahead. Collet-Serra’s genre mechanics, stylized and sober, are efficient. His trains run on time, even if — especially in The Commuter — a rush-hour’s worth of implausibility eventually wrecks the thrill.
Neeson plays Michael MacCauley, an ex-cop who has spent his last decade as a life insurance salesman, commuting into Grand Central from his family’s suburban home up the Hudson in Tarrytown, N.Y.
The movie’s clever overlapping opening montage shows the repetition of his days, begun every day with 1010 Wins on the radio, a ride from his wife to the train station and the crowded but solitary walk through Grand Central.
One day is a bad one. MacCauley is fired five years short of retirement. With his savings depleted by the 2008 financial crisis and college tuition coming for his high-school graduate son, MacCauley’s panic is palpable. He stops for a drink with his old police partner (Patrick Wilson) before boarding the train home. There, he’s greeted by a Hitchcockian stranger on the train (Vera Farmiga) who explains MacCauley will make $100,000 on his ride home if he can only find the person on the train “who doesn’t belong.”
MacCauley, as he soon discovers, has stepped into the plot of an absurdly powerful syndicate that will use him to ferret out a crucial FBI witness. The gaps in the story’s logic aren’t to be minded.
Most eyebrow-raising for the 1.6 to 3.1 million who trudge into and out of Manhattan every day will be an unforgivable incongruity in the train’s otherwise largely accurate path. It makes various subway stops through Manhattan, when every commuter since the time of Revolutionary Road knows it runs straight to Harlem.
As always, Neeson is a lone warrior trying to stay decent in a fallen world. With pandering references to the big banks throughout, The Commuter has just enough smarts to make its final destination disappointing, but there are worse tickets to punch, especially in January.