Taken for yet another risible ride with Neeson
THE Taken films with Liam Neeson mercifully appear to have stopped at Taken 3 — but this film’s subtitle might as well be ‘T ‘Taken 4: A Ride’, as our ageing action hero, again risking life and limb to save his family, this time gets into a laughably unlikely spot of bother on a commuter train heading out of New York City.
Director Jaume Collet-Serra made the 2 2014 film Non-Stop with Neeson, in which h he crammed a plane journey with e everything conceivable, and occasionally inconceivable, that might happen on board a transatlantic flight.
Here, he gives a train journey the same treatment. The Commuter is like a crazed modern hybrid of Murder On The Orient Express and Strangers On A Train, with a plot that grows less credible with every forward chug.
Neeson plays Mike MacCauley, a former cop now working in Manhattan as an insurance broker so that he and his wife (Elizabeth McGovern, almost as drippy as she was as Downton’s Lady Crawley) can see their son through college.
He has taken the same train to and from work for ten years and seems to know all the regulars on it by name, which I don’t suppose happens in New York any more than it does on the 17.45 from Charing Cross to Tunbridge Wells.
On the day Mike unexpectedly loses his job, an enigmatic femme fatale (Vera Farmiga) sits opposite him on the train and makes him a bizarre offer: she will pay him $100,000 if he finds someone on the journey she needs to identify. Why she can’t find this person herself is never satisfactorily explained, but suffice to say it has something to do with a conspiracy in City Hall.
Mike is soon forced to co-operate, otherwise something terrible will happen to his wife and son, cue several fights, one or two deaths and a speeding-trainin-danger-of-derailment episode that seems to belong to a different movie.
Neeson, the consummate pro, gives his all to this nonsense, and a decent supporting cast includes Sam Neill, Jonathan Banks and Patrick Wilson. But there’s a yawning gulf here between action and plausibility. Mind the gap.