The Commuter

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Directed by: Jaume Collet-Serra
Written by: Byron Willinger & Philip de Blasi and Ryan Engle
Starring: Liam Neeson, Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga, Andy Nyman, Roland Møller, Shazad Latif, Ella Rae-Smith, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, Colin McFarlane, Clara Lago, Florence Pugh, Jonathan Banks, Adam Nagaitis, Sam Neill, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Elizabeth McGovern, Dean-Charles Chapman
Action/Crime/Drama - 104 min          Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 10 Jan 2018
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When your hear Liam Neeson stars in another Jaume Collet-Serra film, there are a few givens you already know.  Neeson’s character will be placed in a situation with his back up against the wall, he will become increasingly desperate, and there will be a ticking clock for him to solve the mystery.  He will usually require a very particular set of skills and his character will have some backstory dimensions to achieve the minimum requirement of reminding us Neeson has never quite played this exact type of guy before.  It is astonishing how blatant Collet-Serra and Neeson plagiarize their established formula to create a movie we’ve all seen before.  The Commuter is retread material at best and a carbon copy, don’t waste your money on this needless sequel at worst.  

Collet-Serra and Neeson (Silence) descend from the confined spaces of Non-Stop’s airplane mystery/action-thriller into the confined spaces of a train in this locomotive mystery/action-thriller.  Neeson’s cop in Non-Stop was an alcoholic set up as the fall guy to try and solve the shenanigans in a passenger airliner.  In The Commuter, Neeson’s ex-cop is a recently fired insurance salesman set up as the fall guy to try and solve the shenanigans on a passenger train.  His characters in his other collaborations with Collet-Serra (Unknown and Run All Night) share similar characteristics, but they are more first cousins while Non-Stop and The Commuter are fraternal twins.
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The Commuter is a rules mystery.  The catalyst, in this case Vera Farmiga (The Conjuring 2) as a behavioral scientist and later omnipotent presence on the phone, informs Neeson’s Michael MacCauley that all he has to do is perform some innocent investigation, receive a bunch of money for his services, and have nothing to do with the consequences.  But there are rules.  No phones, no telling anybody else what he is doing, yada yada yada.  The most famous of the action movie rules is Speed.  Dennis Hopper said the bus couldn’t go below 50, nobody can get get off the bus, yada yada yada.  At least The Commuter’s three script writers steal from the best source material available to them.
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The Commuter plays out somewhat in real time as a fictional train from Grand Central Station meanders into the suburbs.  The particular stop locations and time between stations are fudged as required for the script to function.  When it’s time to clear some extraneous people off the train, a stop will appear.  When the story’s exposition needs more time to offer another clue or a fight needs to break out, the time in between stops increases.  To turn the screws on the tension and break up the tedium of Neeson’s back-and-forth carriage pacing, the consequences of his possible failure increase.  First, it’s just personal threats, then it’s the rest of the train passengers; finally, the bad guys will kill his family should he not follow through.
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I do not envy Neeson’s assignment.  Finding nefarious foes on an airliner seems easier than the train.  In the sky, everybody is centrally located with restricted movements.  On the train, people get on, get off, move seats, use their phones; it’s a logistical nightmare.  MacCauley rides this train every day and has for the past 10 years.  He knows the regulars and recognizes first-timers.  He must find someone who does not belong; they are carrying something on them that “powerful” people want very bad.  MacCauley doesn’t have to kill them; just tag them with a GPS tracker.  This is the film’s attempt at audience participation.
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The moral dilemma Collet-Serra wants you to ask yourself is, “would you do it?”  Use what you know, tag somebody, take the money, and that’s it.  You have no idea why you are tagging anybody, but $100,000 is a lot of money for a recently unemployed 60 year-old with a son headed off to an expensive university.  The filmmakers may want us to pose this question to ourselves, but nobody in the audience will care enough to go through the exercise.  We don’t care.  We already know Liam Neeson is going to come off as a loose canon, crazy person as he sifts through all the clues and appears to be the main threat to everyone’s safety even though he is trying to save them all.
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Don’t dive too deep into the script’s what-ifs; you’re going to hit the plot holes.  What if MacCauley immediately says no and gets off the train, what if he ignores Vera Farmiga and goes back to reading his book, what if he didn’t even get on the train?  Even skipping over the ludicrous scenario, there is just so much about The Commuter to not care about.  Collet-Serra tries to squeeze in a commentary about the middle-class worker exploited by soulless multi-national corporations and the disdain of how white color Wall Street views them, but none of these themes stick.  There is another fist-fight to get to, more plot twists to scramble in, and another Neeson/Collet-Serra escapade to endure.  They are already preparing another film for 2019 which will take place only in a car.  They found their formula and they’re sticking to it knowing full well a certain slice of movie-goers will watch Liam Neeson and his particular set of skills do anything in any mode of transportation.
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