The Commuter

photo courtesy of teaser-trailer.com

SPOILER-FREE REVIEW

     Liam Neeson’s latest action extravaganza is The Commuter, in which Neeson plays a down-on-his-luck ex-cop named Michael MacCauley. On his usual commuter train route, he encounters a mysterious woman (Vera Farmiga) with an unusual offer: in exchange for $100,000, MacCauley must identify one passenger on the train who doesn’t belong. But what begins as a proposal soon becomes a command, and before he knows it, MacCauley’s life—and the lives of all the other passengers—are in danger.

     It’s a decent, potentially exciting premise, one which gives The Commuter ample opportunity to let Neeson do his trademark swashbuckling action. But those two features—a decent concept and Neeson swashing all the buckles—are where The Commuter’s strengths begin and end. In execution, the movie plays similarly to Red Eye, a 2005 action thriller starring Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy, in which Murphy’s character takes advantage of the claustrophobic environment in a packed red eye flight to coerce McAdams’ participation in his evil plot. But while The Commuter boasts an uptick in the action quotient, Red Eye is a lot more successful at creating and sustaining tension.

photo courtesy of trailers.apple.com

     The Commuter doesn’t find a successful balance between action and intrigue. It struggles to maintain audience interest as MacCauley spends time whittling down his targets to a manageable group, walking back and forth across the train and talking to the usual suspects over and over. When the pace finally kicks into gear, it does so at the expense of sanity. The film’s final act introduces increasingly unlikely plot points, features too many predictable twists and turns, and, weirdly enough, suddenly decides that The Commuter has been a comedy all along. (What fun!)

     On the plus side, Vera Farmiga’s performance is one of the movie’s highlights. Her roles in Bates Motel and the Conjuring franchise have given her a reputation as a scream queen, and that aptitude is on display even in her surprisingly brief appearance in The Commuter. The movie would have benefited from putting her character more front and center.

photo courtesy of thefancarpet.com

     One potentially fruitful through line is the movie’s concern with the plights of the working class. The struggle of everyday people against faceless, pitiless corporations is a theme the movie hammers home on several occasions, and it certainly adds some dimension to the proceedings.  It’s not every day that the hero of an action movie is a failing insurance agent on his second mortgage, but that’s what The Commuter offers us. Unfortunately, The Commuter isn’t content to let it be subtext, instead making the point painfully explicit.

     But when it comes down to it, The Commuter basically does its job, giving audiences another (fairly interchangeable) Liam Neeson action flick. It may not be the most exciting or the most sophisticated movie, but with managed expectations, it’s a mostly entertaining watch. I think plenty of people will enjoy it, but fair warning: The Commuter makes a lot more sense as a one-time, streaming-service movie for a night in than it does an outing to the theater.

Watch the trailer here.

photo courtesy of variety.com