Unconvincing `Commuter' goes off rails
Half “The Lady Vanishes,” half “The Girl on the Train,” films don’t come much dumber or more aimed at only the most gullible audiences than “The Commuter,” a film the great Liam Neeson, who has made many slightly superior efforts of this kind, should have passed on.
Neeson is Michael MacCauley, former NYPD detective turned over-extended life insurance salesman happily married to Karen (Elizabeth McGovern). They live with their college-bound son in Tarrytown in a big, overmortgaged home from which Michael takes the MetroNorth to Manhattan every day.
On the day the film begins, Michael is sacked from his job after 10 years, meets his
former police partner Murph (Patrick Wilson) for a few drinks, loses his phone and gets on the train home. There he meets a few of the people he rides with regularly, plus a mysterious femme fatale calling herself Joanna (Vera Farmiga, whose role consists of two scenes and phone calls).
She tells the cash-strapped Michael that if he can “do this little thing” — that is, find “the person who does not belong on the train” and is getting off at the last stop — he will be paid $100,000 in cash, starting with a $25G sweetener up front. Do you buy this? I did not, and everything that happened afterward — the confrontations, the chasing up and down the train cars, the fights, even the train riders’ worst nightmare — was more some kind of stupid game show than movie for me, and I hate game shows.
The over-60-year-old Neeson gamely does many of his own fight scenes. But while an ex-cop, Michael does not have the “certain skills” of CIA operative Bryan Mills of the 10-year-old original “Taken.” One indication of how badly “The Commuter” misfires is that it utterly wastes the talent of Sam Neill as a police captain.
The film was written by newcomers Byron Willinger and Philip de Blasi as well as Ryan Engle of “Unknown.” “The Commuter” director Jaume Collet-Serra (“The Shallows”) is a hack, who has worked previously with Neeson on “Non-Stop,” “Unknown” and “Run All Night.” Yeah, you might have seen these low-quality genre films. But you don’t remember them.
Near the end of “The Commuter,” everything, except the train, stops so that Michael, who has been in about three fights so far, can play Texas Hold ’em with two other passengers. Can I get off this ride?
Even later, Michael has everyone cover the windows of the train with newspaper. The last time I was on a train, I was the only person with a newspaper. The writers even have the gall to steal a landmark scene from “Spartacus.”
In the supporting cast, the standouts are Colin McFarlane and Adam Nagaitis as the train’s conductors. The only other directors Neeson has worked with as much as Collet-Serra are probably Christopher Nolan and Martin Scorsese, and while Scorsese’s “Silence” may have been a misfire, and the marks of the starvation Neeson experienced for the role may still be on the actor’s face, I have two pieces of advice for Neeson: Eat a cheeseburger and call Marty.