Movie Review: 'The Commuter'

The Commuter is yet another desperately silly effort from Liam Neeson. Once again teaming with director Jaume Collet Serra, Neeson is once again playing an action hero in a desperate situation in which life and death hang in the balance. At this point, a trip to the grocery store could be the premise for a Neeson action hero; it’s not as if he needs anything more than a place, a gun and an elaborate idiot plot for his Mad Libs take on the action genre.

In The Commuter, Liam Neeson stars as Michael, an Insurance Agent and former cop who takes the train to the city every day. Michael’s life is changed forever when he loses his job and on his commuter train home he is approached by an odd but attractive woman named Joanna (Vera Farmiga) who makes a unique proposition. Joanna wants Michael to use his knowledge of the regular riders on the train to find the one person who doesn’t belong.

This person is carrying a bag and Michael is to tag the bag with a GPS tracker. In exchange for doing this, Michael will receive $25,000 waiting for him hidden on the train and another $75,000 after he gets the job done. Michael is dubious until he finds the initial payment and decides to do the job. Naturally, nothing is as it appears. When Michael tries to back out of the deal he gets a message that his family is in danger and he is forced to continue.

I mentioned Mad Libs earlier and admittedly that is a shallow and glib interpretation. That said, we’ve seen Liam Neeson play a very similar character as this one only on a plane in Non-Stop. In that film, Neeson played an innocent man who was being framed for taking over a plane. Here, Neeson’s Michael is being framed for taking over a commuter train so as glib as the Mad Libs comparison is, it’s not exactly off-base.

Also like Non-Stop, The Commuter is plagued by silliness in both character and dialogue. Both films were directed by Jaume Collet Serra who prefers expositional shortcuts to actual character development. That means that characters who know each other are forced to introduce themselves in clunky dialogue such as "Mike, we were partners for seven years," a line delivered by poor Patrick Wilson who plays half of an unintentionally hilarious red herring duo with Sam Neill.

Wilson and Neill function as plot devices who you know have to come back into the story at some point with one of them having to be the villain. It was obvious to me who was the bad guy, but if you, for some reason, want to experience this idiocy for yourself, I will avoid the spoilers. The payoff is quite a funny and sad series of scenes so implausible and dopey I could hardly stifle my giggles.

The Commuter is quite a bad movie, but I can’t say that Liam Neeson is all that bad in it. Yes, he can’t redeem this silly material with the sheer strength of his charisma and talent but I imagine The Commuter would be unwatchable if not for Neeson’s competent performance. He does what he can with the silliness of The Commuter and I feel it only fair to give him some positive notice.

If you like mindless action movies that make little sense, insult your intelligence, but have the decency to star Liam Neeson, you might find something to like about The Commuter. It’s a bad movie but it’s a fun bad; a bad movie I enjoyed for its badness. Neeson grounds the material with his professionalism and talent, but he also serves to show how incredibly silly the movie around him truly is.