On his way home after losing his job, insurance salesman (and ex-cop) Michael MacCauley (Neeson) unwisely accepts a bag of money to uncover the identity of someone on his regular commute. But as the train hurtles towards its final destination, Michael discovers there’s more at stake than he imagined.
Liam Neeson has a very particular set of skills, skills he has acquired over a very long career. Which other actor boasts a CV that includes a Star Wars, a Batman, three Narnias, Love Actually, a Lego Movie and an Oscar nomination, and packs enough box-office muscle to turn a turkey like Taken into a trilogy?
- Between franchises, there have been peaks (The Grey, A Walk Among The Tombstones) and deep, deep troughs (Battleship, Taken 2 and 3), but if you liked Neeson in director Collet-Serra’s vertiginously high-concept thrillers Unknown (nobody recognises our Liam!), Non-Stop (there’s a killer on Liam’s plane!), and Run All Night (he's got a single night to save his son!), you’ll be pleased to hear that their fourth collaboration is their best yet. If you didn’t, you’ll know that’s damning with faint praise.
Neeson certainly has the chops to pull off a Hitchcockian thriller, so it’s a pity Collet-Serra doesn’t, because The Commuter gives them one hell of a plot – find the stranger on a train – coupled with an almost real-time race against the clock device Hitch would have straight up killed for. No, it doesn’t make a lick of sense – the logic bombs start exploding before the train leaves the station – but Neeson makes for an engaging everyman-in-peril, and is at his most relatable as the newly unemployed insurance salesman having a bad day take a turn for the worse.
Supporting cast-wise, it’s no Murder On The Orient Express, but it’s good to have Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson (who, after this and The A-Team, Liam really needs to stop trusting), Jonathan Banks, Sam Neill and Elizabeth McGovern along for the ride. En route, a succession of increasingly implausible plot twists ratchet up the tension, Neeson gets to throw some punches, Brian Mills-style (he’s ex-NYPD, remember), and by the time the train, and the film, go off the rails in spectacular fashion, you’ll probably be having too much fun to care.
