Respond to these rapid questions in our The Commuter quiz and we will tell you which The Commuter character you are. Play it now.
With its paranoia-soaked railroad thriller “The Commuter,” director Liam Neeson continues his unofficial “Liam Neeson Late Winter Butt Kickers” series with the latest installment that is frustratingly not quite there from start to finish. They began in January 2009 with the surprise hit “Taken,” and have continued with more “Taken” films, as well as three Liam Neeson adventures directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, who is also the director of this latest installment (“Unknown,” “Non-Stop” and “Run All Night” were the others). It has become almost as much a part of our moviegoing diet as the holidays themselves, and they are ingrained in our seasonal calendar as the holidays themselves. The unfussy determination of Liam Neeson, a couple of impressively choreographed action sequences (including a one-take, hand-to-hand fight that attempts to outdo the famous hammer sequence from “Oldboy”), and an intriguing premise that the filmmakers never manage to fully exploit make this new entry worth seeing. To say something is “worth seeing” does not necessarily imply that you should “rush to the nearest theater, abandoning all else,” but rather that “if this comes on television, you’ll probably watch the entire thing, as long as you’re not in a rush to get somewhere.” Who knows, it might even be an excellent spot for train watching. There are all the signs of a daydream that was obsessively worked over for years during someone’s daily commute to and from work, and the plot is no exception.
Michael MacCauley, played by Liam Neeson, is a 60-year-old former police officer who now works as an insurance salesman in midtown Manhattan. His boss informs him that he has been fired just as he is about to begin his return trip home to see his wife (Elizabeth McGovern, who deserves better than this) and college-aged son (Dean-Charles Chapman), who live in Westchester, Long Island, with their two children. A pickpocket accidentally bumps Michael’s phone in the train station, and Michael is forced to find a mysterious stranger (Vera Farmiga) who tells him that he must locate a specific passenger on the commuter train before it arrives at its final stop and implant a tracking device in him/her, failing which that person will be killed. Upon completion of the mission, Michael will receive a $25,000 cash bonus, with another $75,000 bonus to be paid upon completion of the mission—enough to compensate for the economic damage caused by his firing, which could include the cancellation of a reverse mortgage on the family home that would’ve paid for his son’s college education.
If you believe that a working-class hero who exudes decency would sentence another person to death for the sum of $100,000, you will be entertained by this moral conundrum. But Neeson goes the extra mile to sell us on Michael’s economic desperation as well as his macho pride (Michael couldn’t bring himself to tell his wife and children that he had just been fired, so there’s pressure to make things right immediately so he won’t have to tell them the truth later on in the film).
But you shouldn’t waste any more time and start this The Commuter quiz.
A film by director Collet-Serra, who previously directed the largely excellent shark thriller “The Shallows” and who appears to have a knack for stripped-down, goal-directed action films, is clearly influenced by Alfred Hitchcock films in which action occurs on the dividing line between what is real and what is metaphorical or dreamlike. The kaleidoscope of humanity that Michael encounters on the train is reminiscent of “Rear Window,” the arrangement between him and Farmiga’s character is reminiscent of “Strangers on a Train,” and the notion of a (mostly) ordinary New Yorker being drawn into a conspiracy and struggling to regain control over his life is reminiscent of “North by Northwest.” But in the end, this is an action film set in a confined space that takes place in a tweedy suburban neighborhood. Michael is completely on his own the entire time. Any allies he may have picked up along the way are only temporary, and not all of them can be relied upon.
The Commuter Quiz
The class-warfare and eat-the-rich messages, on the other hand, come across as a bit slapped-on, and the film never quite manages to generate the political framework that would have allowed it to be taken seriously as a parable of this or that, rather than just another movie in which Liam Neeson beats people up. If you meet Michael’s ex-partner (Patrick Wilson) and their former supervisor (Sam Neill) early in the story, and you get a couple of moments where Michael talks about the economic collapse of 2008, and you get a scene that ends with Michael giving the finger to a jerkbag of a stockbroker, and you get a scene where Michael looks up from a bar to see a TV news story about officials being arrested for corruption, you should assume that there are no extraneous No one involved in the production seemed to believe that we would be concerned with clarity when it came to issues such as this. However, the articulation is still lacking: why even make a politically allegorical action film if you’re not going to, you know, actually do the things that it’s supposed to be about? What do you mean, with feeling?
Also, you will find out which character are you in this The Commuter quiz.
I did, however, become emotionally attached to Neeson’s character, thanks in large part to his mastery of “just say your lines and hit your marks” acting. No matter who he is playing in these films, Liam Neeson always approaches the situation with the low-key concentration of a man attempting to open a jam jar that has become stuck. However, reasonable people may disagree with my assessment that Neeson’s late-career brand of business class dad machismo has yet to be fully realized by a director who can fully capture it on film. No one will be debating the finer points of Michael’s late-career filmography when he is hanging underneath a moving train like Indiana Jones, or smashing the little glass box at the end of a car so that he can use the hammer on someone’s skull like in the movie The Matrix, for example.
For more personality quizzes check this: The Commuter Quiz.
