Neeson’s too good to ride this gravy train
The Commuter (out of 4) Starring Liam Neeson, Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Sam Neill and Elizabeth McGovern. Directed by Jaume ColletSerra. Opens Friday at GTA theatres. 104 minutes. 14A
At age 65, Liam Neeson now qualifies for the senior’s discount on the ratrace rail conveyance he rides in The Commuter. His best-before date as an action hero looms, something he admitted while visiting Toronto for TIFF 2017. This may explain why the affably intense Irish actor looks more haunted and in a hurry than usual in his new film, which is a bit of a trainwreck (sorry).
It’s the latest and least of the now four thrillers he’s made with Jaume Collet-Serra, a Spanish director who has previously set Neeson on the hoof in Unknown, Non-Stop and Run All Night. Collet-Serra considers things like gravity, logic and Steadicams irrelevant to plots which barely make a lick of sense, especially this one.
It was written by rookie screenwriters Byron Willinger and Philip de Blasi with Non-Stop scribe Ryan Engle, who must have binge-watched Hitchcock movies and episodes of The Twilight Zone before feverishly setting pen to paper. Neeson’s character Michael McCauley is just 60, as he’ll repeatedly remind us. An ex-NYPD cop now toiling as an insurance salesman, he and his wife (Elizabeth McGovern) and college-bound son (Dean-Charles Chapman) have been struggling financially. Things get a whole lot worse one sunny August morning when Michael’s boss summarily fires him, no reason given.
A few rueful brewskies later, Michael commences the return from Manhattan to his suburban New York home, via the Metro-North commuter train he rides ever weekday. He’s anguishing over how to tell his wife the bad news.
Opportunity knocks in the curious person of a mysterious smiling woman (Vera Farmiga), who sits across from him.
She engages in amateur psychology (“What kind of person are you?”) before offering him $100,000 to use his now-familiar “set of skills” to track down and GPS-tag a person she seeks on the train.
Sounds simple enough, if completely dodgy, but the catch is Michael has never seen or heard of this person before and he has almost no clue as to who he or she is. He barely has time to consider the ethics of the situation when the ante gets upped — he learns his family has been kidnapped and they’ll be goners if he doesn’t comply. Also, the clock is ticking. Michael has to identify the stranger before the train reaches a certain destination. Oh, and he’s lost his cellphone and will have to keep borrowing other people’s.
The story becomes preposterously knotty as Michael frantically tries to solve the puzzle aboard a train that will eventually go from merely speeding to zooming out of control.
Seems a criminal cabal is watching his every move and it’s also capable of rubbing out people at will. Which begs the question: If this gang is so smart, why do they need a mook like Michael as an involuntary tracker?
The mystery woman’s aggravated complaint — “I asked you to do one little thing!” — becomes unintentionally hilarious as one absurd situation after another piles up, amid a rogue’s gallery of characters straight out of Murder on the Orient Express.
Somebody yells, “Mike, this is crazy!” and all you can do is chuckle in agreement. I love the insanity of the scene where Michael orders fellow passengers to gather up newspapers and paste them onto windows using only water, to avoid being spotted by the bad guys.
Neeson is the rare actor who can made something as dumb as this reasonably diverting, at least until you run out of patience with the increasingly arcane plot. It’s a little sad, though, to see a star of Neeson’s stature continue to do paycheque gigs that have become increasingly less satisfying since the unexpected success of kidnapping thriller Taken a decade ago.
He has a lot of fellow travellers on the gravy train. Besides McGovern and Farmiga, who are also better actors than this film gives them credit for, The Commuter also has characters played by Patrick Wilson, Sam Neill, Killian Scott, Mudbound’s Jonathan Banks and Lady Macbeth breakout Florence Pugh. That’s a lot of talent to waste on a train ride to nowhere.