Review: The Commuter

Insurance guy Liam Neeson has just lost his job and wallet as he boards the train home to greet wife Elizabeth McGovern and his college-bound kid with the bad news. First he’s greeted by train passenger Vera Farmiga, who offers him a proposition: Locate someone on the train who ‘doesn’t belong’ and $100,000 will be Neeson’s as reward. Seems simple enough, and Farmiga tells him that Neeson will never have to know the consequences for the person he identifies. Yeah, there’s a lot more to it than that. Patrick Wilson plays Neeson’s cop buddy, Jonathan Banks is a train passenger, and Sam Neill is the police captain whom neither Neeson or Wilson seem to like all that much.

I groaned audibly in the cinema when I saw the trailer for this film. Director Jaume Collet-Serra and star Liam Neeson drink from the same well one too many times with this derivative 2018 thriller. It’s “Non-Stop” but on a train, and not nearly as good. The best I can say for it is that like all of these gimmicky mystery-thrillers there’s a certain watchability (screw spell-check, it’s a word!) to it because you want to see where it goes, but there’s such a lack of originality here that the watchability is very, very low in this case. Almost negligible, actually.

Hitchcock knew how to stretch out this sort of material, and Collet-Serra has previously shown an aptitude for it too (“Non-Stop”, “Unknown”, “Run All Night”, “The Shallows”), but when it’s such a carbon copy this was always going to be pretty worthless. Meanwhile, poor casting ruins the film’s supposed ‘surprise’ twist. You’ll figure it out almost immediately when you see the performer in question. The absolute nadir is an ‘I am Spartacus!’ moment that will have you rolling your eyes. I also think the first act is far too slow, with Neeson getting fired and losing his wallet. Did we really need all of that stuff? Get to the nitty-gritty ASAP.

It’s a typically good-looking film from Collet-Serra and veteran character actor Jonathan Banks impresses early, but is sadly not in the film much. I did like the bit where Neeson tells the yuppie schmuck exactly what every audience member is thinking. That as a good moment. Otherwise, even Neeson has been much better elsewhere and the supporting cast are mostly bland.

Mostly useless mystery/thriller is a virtual re-tread and not even terribly watchable in a flimsy time-wasting sense. There’s something to be said for disposable but diverting thrillers, but I was pretty keen to dispose of this one fairly early on due to its lack of originality. Pretty insulting, really. The screenplay is by Byron Willinger, Philip de Blasi and Ryan Engle, the former two being debutants and the latter…well, guess what he previously wrote? “Non-Stop”. Yeah, funny that.

Rating: C-