The Commuter

Liam Neeson gets on the train in a pretty bad mood, and it's about to get worse when he finds out that Vera Farmiga has manipulated him into a conspiracy in which his neck is on the line. And not just him. The Commuter is a solid action flick, and exactly what you'd expect from the makers of Unknown and Non-Stop. But you can tell they're running out of ideas. It still paces pretty well and you get exactly what you expect in the cinema, but not a tad more. I quite enjoyed it, but I would have liked to see Neeson and director Jaume Collet-Serra move on to other projects and maybe even genres. They don't have much to offer here anymore. (27/07/2018)

The Commuter is a surprisingly bad thriller (considering it promised to be the next Non-Stop), where not only is there no consistent story logic, but the fights are very digital and unrealistic, which is unacceptable in today’s filmmaking. It doesn’t work even as an entertaining genre movie, as the only things worth mentioning here are Liam Neeson and a casting inside joke for movie geeks in the form of Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga from the Conjuring series. (08/02/2018)

A movie so moronic I'm embarrassed to look down on it. Collet-Serra is one of the best genre directors working today, and with his ideas and dynamism he practically always wrestles at least a mediocre experience out of utterly terrible screenplays. The same is true here, though I daresay he hasn't held such a monstrosity in his hand yet. My secret theory is that Collet-Serra doesn't read the scripts, but to save time he transcribes them image by image into technical scripts, and by extension storyboards. On page 109 he definitely no longer knows what page nine was about, or rather he probably doesn't even know what page 107 was about, but instead he's making up stuff about how people are going to be cutting themselves with axes and guitars in long digital shots, assisted by a flying camera, and I love him for that. (21/04/2018)

Let me put it mildly and say that the filmmakers didn't do a very good job of making the film. I’ll keep all the curse words to myself. I've never had anything against Liam Neeson. I was there with him when he was rescuing his daughter and wife, or walking over tombstones, and I’ve always been quite satisfied, but I shouldn't have gotten on that train with him. I think an honest tagline for this film could be: How an Aging Insurance Guy Gets Lucky. At least that would have been a red flag for me. Liam Neeson really wasn't up to the role, the plot was stupid and predictable, the ending was incredibly dumb, and I didn’t enjoy this at all. I'm giving it two stars because no trains were harmed during the making of the film. (24/06/2018)

This is already the fourth collaboration between Liam Neeson and Jaume Collet-Serra (which had previously worked flawlessly), but it didn’t turn out as I had hoped. I didn’t let the mixed reviews sway me, but the result was not particularly impressive. The idea with the train is fine; the first half can be considered successful, with the viewer unsure of what might happen, and Neeson still manages to convey his worried expression of a man whose wife and son have been abducted. But then, what I feared happened. It turned into a bit of a farce, with logic going out the window, and the plot kept twisting in various directions. I wouldn’t have minded that if it had been presented more reasonably and slowly, allowing the viewer to keep up. Even the fights didn’t manage to save it in the end, which I don’t understand at all. They felt very staged, lacking realism. And the final scene with the train derailment? The digital effects didn’t come across as well as they probably intended. The minor plot twist at the end could have been predicted an hour earlier. I don’t mind happy endings, but here it was over the top. Next time, I’d prefer a proper thriller that plays with suspense rather than a digital train and a convoluted story. I give it 56%. (02/06/2018)