The Commuter (2018)

Neeson once again delivers a strong performance as an insurance salesman in “The Commuter,” who is directly taken into a criminal conspiracy and must find a mysterious woman aboard a speeding train before it reaches its destination. It must certainly be cursed to achieve such a missing mark on what seems to be a thrilling premise of a paranoia-driven railroad drama. Another brilliantly directed film by Jaume Collet-Serra in which Neeson starred in one of his last films. But let’s be realistic, it is nearly never the ‘right’ time to catch one of these. With the hammer kick fight sequence in the elevator combined with a truly one-of-a-kind, masterfully created action sequence, this new installment, along with the rest of the LNLWBKs, is a must-see for anyone that has the time.

It seems as if the plot of this film is nothing more than a concoction that was nurtured during countless commutes to work.

In this particular movie, Liam Neeson plays the role of an insurance salesman by the name of Michael MacCauley. Michael is 60 years old, a former cop, and now works in midtown Manhattan. The first few scenes, some of which include Manhattan’s Skyscrapers, exhibit Michael returning to work after a lunch break. Much to his shock, the more Michael MacCauley seems to look for his bosses, the more he seems to be at a water cooler gossiping with his coworkers. Just as he is about to excuse himself for the day so that he can get back to his wife and son in West Shop Place, he is told that he is ‘being let go’. Michael then has to rely on public transport to get back to his family, Elizabeth McGovern and Dean Charles Chapman, both of whom deserve better than Michael. Wanting to cover his bases before he gets on the train, Michael goes to ATMs to withdraw cash. To his dismay, Michael now also does not secure his belongings properly and manages to get his phone stolen from him solely for an issue that is a tad bit too complex to explain. Now, Michael ends up bumping into a stranger played by Vera Farmiga, who informs Michael that he needs to help her retrieve a phone from a certain passenger on the office public transportation that shifts its route to a specified endpoint. The catch here is that in order for Michael to get a $25,000 reward on deposit and $75,000 in return for the phone, he has to plant a microphone within those tablets. If he fulfills the order, Michael will earn enough money to reverse the economic crisis his firing has set in motion, including getting rid of the reverse mortgage on his family home, which he desperately needs in order to fund his child’s education.

Director Collet-Serra, who did the mostly terrific shark thriller “The Shallows” and whose forte seems to be these stripped-down, directed-aimed action movies, seems to enjoy Alfred Hitchcock films, where the action takes place in the ambiguity between reality and the metaphor or dreamlike. The kaleidoscope of humanity that Michael meets on the train is a touch of “Rear Window.’ ” The arrangement between him and Farmiga’s character is a faint echo of “Strangers on a Train.” And there is some hint of “North by Northwest,” where a (mostly) ordinary New Yorker gets roped into some conspiracy and then struggles to regain control over his life. But in the end, though, this is a suburban version of confined action space thriller. Michael is always on his own. Any and all allies he may acquire over the course of the story are only temporary, and he can’t trust them all.

The class warfare and eat-the-rich themes are vague to say the least, and the movie itself fails to establish sufficient context to be politically relevant in the same breadth as a movie where Liam Neeson beats people up. If Michael’s ex-partner (Patrick Wilson) and their supervisor (Sam Neill) are introduced during the first act, along with elements such as Michael’s 2008 economic collapse speech, his stockbroker finger, and the corrupt officials press conference, then rest assured the narrative will be resolved, but not without a lot of gaping holes. This is why there seem to be no additional scenes in the film, because everything has to be completely accurate. People on the production team didn’t think we were interested in clarity from this fragment, which, as it turns out, they weren’t entirely wrong. However, the articulation is still lacking: why even do this without feeling, and why without doing right? It only raises further questions.

Neeson addresses whatever problem he is presented with in each of these movies as if he were a guy trying to open a particularly difficult jar of jam, a very low effort yet very calculated form of attacking the problem. Neson’s distinct deficiency style of a hardy business father and active skills has not quite found a director who can give it the proper treatment, although reasonable perspectives may vary. Regardless, I sincerely doubt there will even be a dispute over the finer elements of his late career films when, like Indiana Jones, Michael finds himself underneath a moving train or smashing the hammer out of glass at the end of the car and using it to bludgeon someone’s skull.

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