The template actually kind of worked on Unknown and Non-Stop, capitalizing on Neeson’s post-Taken reboot as a somewhat inexplicable action hero and providing harmless B-movie entertainment in the early winter months of their given years, when quality films can be few and far between (interestingly, the more character-driven and cerebral of the three, Run All Night, was the least successful at the box office). With The Commuter, Collet-Serra and his star return to the action-oriented style of their first two team-ups, but it’s clear that a third trip to that particular well is coming up largely empty. The Commuter opens with a montage as striking as it is stylized, hinting at the more ambitious filmmaker lurking underneath Collet-Serra’s journeyman exterior. We meet Michael MacCauley, a retired cop turned insurance salesman, as he wakes to a 6:00 am alarm next to his wife (Elizabeth McGovern) and gets his day started: coffee, shower, dress, run for the commuter train into New York City. We see this repeat over several years, with a child introduced and growing up along the way, and the three family members going about their daily business together. It’s a thoughtfully crafted way to show the passage of time and establish MacCauley’s life with just a few minutes of screen time. When we settle into the present, MacCauley and his wife are struggling to figure out how to pay college tuition even as their budget is already stretched to the breaking point with a second mortgage (this is The Commuter’s one attempt at social commentary, showing the plight of the middle class these days). But things get much dicier when MacCauley is unexpectedly fired, just five years from retirement, and has to face the prospect of going home to tell his wife the news. The opening scenes of The Commuter are fraught with tension, especially once the plot is set in motion, and in this way it most resembles Non-Stop, in which Neeson’s alcoholic air marshall had to identity a terrorist on a plane while avoiding being framed himself. A similar situation emerges here, with MacCauley soon identified as a crazy man rampaging on a train, but the plot does not move as elegantly as it did in that earlier film. The mechanics of how MacCauley must find the target are overcomplicated and increasingly unbelievable (even for a film like this), with Joanna somehow enjoying almost godlike powers of surveillance, and the 60-year-old MacCauley undergoing a series of physical challenges that would most likely best a man of 40, let alone an ex-cop who’s still in reasonably good shape but has been behind a desk for 10 years (Neeson, to his credit, could do this stuff with his eyes closed but commits to his performance throughout).
The Commuter finally and literally goes off the rails in the third act, but by then the narrative twists and turns are more banal than surprising, and you’re just waiting for the inevitable and expected payoff. Although the plot drags itself down, Collet-Serra largely keeps the pace of the film up, but his attempts at making the material visually interesting–a long extended shot down the entire length of the train, an extended, seemingly one-take fight sequence–only end up showing the seams where CG is being employed in what should nominally be a gritty and non-enhanced narrative. It’s not the worst way to waste a couple of hours on a chilly January afternoon, but The Commuter is easily the least of Neeson and Collet-Serra’s quartet of potboilers. The director has done some interesting work outside their thrillers as well (his Orphan is still one of the more bonkers horror movies of the past decade), so it’s disappointing to see him and the always watchable Neeson deliver something so rote. The Commuter is, in many ways, just like that daily train ride that millions of people take every day: you forget it ever happened the minute you disembark. The Commuter is out in theaters on Friday, Jan. 12.
title: “The Commuter Review” ShowToc: true date: “2025-08-04” author: “Robert Rogers”
Like those other films, The Commuter seems tailor-made for people who own loyalty cards for their local cinema: if you’re at a loose end one cold January evening, and you fancy a mid-budget thriller, then you’ll know roughly what to expect here. In a way, it’s Murder On The Orient Express, except with Liam Neeson hitting a guy over the head with an electric guitar. Still reeling from his dismissal, Mike takes the train back out of New York, and finds himself embroiled in a murderous conspiracy. First, a cold-eyed Vera Farmiga shows up with an offer of $100,000 in cash if he tracks down an anonymous person on the train – though she flatly refuses to say what’ll happen to that person once Mike finds them. Things become more complicated when Mike refuses to play ball with the bad guys who keep ringing him up with increasingly dire threats, and he sets about trying to figure out who they’re after and why. It’s all a bit like Non-Stop – a paranoid, daft thriller on a plane – minus the wings, though if anything, The Commuter’s even more bonkers than that earlier Neeson vehicle. It’s all sober enough at first: this is a rare 21st century Neeson film that has him playing with something approaching his own accent (it’s established early on that he’s Irish) and that admits to his advancing years – Mike’s 60, and isn’t afraid to admit it. This means that, as a thriller, The Commuter isn’t exactly Hitchcock-calibre. What Collet-Sera does bring to the movie, though, is escalation. What threatens to be a by-the-numbers whodunnit gradually drifts into joyous absurdity – and it’s here, as the violence mounts and the bullets fly, that The Commuter becomes far more entertaining. There’s a familiar yet tense sequence in the middle of the movie that’s actually really good – this marks the departure point from reality, it turns out, as Collet-Sera and his writers let things go deliriously, hilariously off the rails. From an acting standpoint, The Commuter doesn’t make the best use of a decent cast, which includes Patrick Wilson, Sam Neill and the up-and-coming Florence Pugh in pretty flavourless roles. There’s the constant sense, though, that everyone knows what they’ve let themselves in for – not least Neeson, who reacts to the increasingly bizarre train of events with his typical stoic charisma. There’s stuff in here that would’ve made Roger Moore raise a knowing eyebrow in one of his late-career Bond movies, but Neeson’s refusal to wink at the camera actually makes the film funnier than if he treated the whole thing as an exercise in high camp. The earnestness with which he tells a carriage-load of passengers to stick wet newspapers on the windows, for example, is quite wonderful in its humourlessness. The Commuter is out in UK cinemas on the 19th January.
