Tuesday 16 January 2018

Review: The Commuter

The Commuter (2018) - Jaume Collete-Serra

       I thought of something as I sat down to the one in the afternoon on a Monday showtime of The Commuter (Thank you Dr. King, your words and actions are a constant inspiration, even more today, because the world is straight raw dirty fucked), the newest in the never-ending deluge of Liam Neeson-starring action movies about him being a man with a particular set of skills that for some reason people keep fucking with his family. I sat down and realized: I have never seen any of the past decade of Liam Neeson action films (and there have been loads, three Takens, Run All Night, Non-Stop, Unknown), except maybe The Grey, which I only kind of saw (like, yes I saw it, but no, I was not sober enough to remember anything about it other than the fighting-wolves-with-bottles-on-his-hands-scene happened OFF-SCREEN. Fuck, that still makes me so mad). I just never really felt like I was missing out on much. The stories were right there in the trailer and the action just never seemed all that...persuasive. And remember, these were the days before moviepass when I wouldn't just go spend every day in the a movie theatre because it's better than the crushing silence of loneliness. I jest!
       ANYWHO. As I watched The Commuter I came to the realization that I like the idea of Liam Neeson as an action star much more than I like him as an actual action star. As an actual action star he's kind of...eh. I mean, he's a legitimate badass, and that carries through enough to make him not terrible to watch, but Neeson is seriously just kind of....eh. He has two modes, which are perfect upstanding family man, and barking gruff-o-saurus, and there's no in-between. At least not in his latest output with Jaume Collete-Serra, his oft-collaborator. I like it better when we're kinda winking at how badass and action-y Liam Neeson is, without him ever actually having to do too much actual stuff (like in The Lego Movie, A Million Ways to Die in the West, and Ted, or Family Guy, or even The Orville...Holy shit, Seth McFarlane must have seen him burying a body at some point.)
       And all that long-ass intro brings us to here, The Commuter, the continuing fart space that is January releases. I did not enjoy this movie. This movie's plot is so needlessly confusing twisty but no one involved in the creation process was smart to enough to make any of it really make any sense. It's basically the film Non-Stop (from what I gleamed from the trailers, which was basically the whole movie, because trailers) but on a...you guessed it, commuter train! He has to do some stuff...find some people...figure out clues? It was basically a slightly less boring version of Murder on the Orient Express, but with a less racist title, vaguely more excitement, and not as many famous, abusive, cunt actors (Fuck you Johnny Depp).
       The movie starts with a montage of Liam Neeson getting up in the morning, over and over, being the perfect husband and father, day in and day out. Oh boy! He's a regular guy! He is a good dad! Aw! I sure hope nothing bad will ever happen to his family! Seriously, at this point Liam Neeson is just being irresponsible marrying all these women and having children. He knows something awful is going to happen to them at some point. So this time, Vera Farmiga (who rules, and I hope made a payday for the probable two to three day shoot she had) goes up to Neeson while he's on his regular train back home after being fired from his insurance job (Oh no! He's a regular guy! But now he got fired! Why can't a good guy catch a break!), which I guess ends up marginally mattering to the plot, but mostly it's just badly written emotional stakes, and she offers him 100,000 dollars to...find someone. On the train. Someone who doesn't belong? She speaks in riddles, takes off, and then Neeson takes some of the bathroom money intended as reward, making him involved, and then his family is in danger because Farmiga has people everywhere and can do everything and have lovable old bald men killed instantly at any moment.
       I'm finding myself repeating myself when I write reviews for bad action movies. First I judge the actual plot, characters, emotionality of the film (which is always stupid, non-existent, convoluted, or just plain terribly-made), and then I always say that I could forgive all that if the action was exciting or the comedy was funny or the emotional points were actually emotional. It's a little song and dance I'm finding myself doing over and over.
       I hate to repeat my and get into a predictable rhythm...but goddamnit, this movie was exorbitantly stupid and unnecessarily complicated for very little payoff. The actual mystery/plot is ridiculous and the way he goes about trying to "solve" it is laughable. The action scenes (of which there aren't very many) are just blurs of bad CGI and sped-up punching (much like the gunshots in my last reviewed film, Proud Mary) made difficult to fully perceive due to poor direction. And occasionally there are terrible "jokes" meant to make us "laugh," and also some weird emotional through-line about how commuters on a train are like a close-knit group of friends, but is executed with the nuance of a seven-year-old who is screaming because they can't drink water from the toilet.
       The worst thing about the movie is the general conceit: Why does Vera Farmiga need Liam Neeson, an ex-cop with a particular set of skills (I swear to god she uses those exact words. It's like even in the fake universe the movie inhabits everyone knows Liam Neeson is actually secretly a hitman-assassin-ninja-action-secret-badass-deity), to find this particular person on the train, if she can literally control everything? The moment he tries to tell a friend to call the cops she knows about it, and has someone instantly killed. She can have young kids stop Liam Neeson just as he was about to get off the train to give him his wife's wedding ring to signify his family's in danger, but she can't figure out who a single person is, someone who she knows has been in direct contact with the FBI? Ugh. Why am I thinking this hard? A movie this stupid shouldn't be making me think this hard. It should be fun and entertaining and--oh wait, yeah, we covered that.
 
       Yeaaaaah, they kind of explain some of the plot points I've been griping about at the end with one quick sentence that does kind of clear things up, but only after an hour and forty minutes of stupid sequences and plot twists that no one cared about or asked for. And then there's Liam, just trudging along, being gruff and coarse and screamy when he needs to be, and being confused and worried about his family the other times. Yawn. This movie was about as much fun as actually taking the train somewhere.

Grade: 3 out of 10 Murdered Mike Ehrmantraut (I spelled that correctly on the first try and that makes me so much happier than anything in this movie did!)
     

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