The Commuter

Whatever I thought of this movie, put that aside. I love Liam Neeson. My first exposure to him was through Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. And yeah, that movie isn't very good but it's Star Wars, and if you are in Star Wars, in my mind you can do no wrong. I later discovered that Liam Neeson is not that bad of an actor. You see him in movies like Schindler's List, he's absolutely phenomenal.

And then in 2008, a little movie called Taken came out. No longer was Liam Neeson just Oskar Schindler, no longer was he the kind of irresponsible dad who let his son jump a security station in a still jumpy post 9/11 world in Love Actually. No, Liam Neeson was a freaking action star.

But while Liam Neeson looks old, 2008 was ten years ago. He was in his mid-fifties, an age that a lot of actors these days are rocking with style. Robert Downey Jr, Tom Cruise, Johnny Depp. 50 has become the new 40, so it's not like Liam Neeson was doing anything too different.

Well 10 years passed, we got two more Taken sequels than we needed and an odd slew of movies that were not Taken sequels... but at the same time weren't NOT Taken sequels.

Yes, I know there is a difference between The Commuter and the Taken franchise. Nobody actually gets TAKEN in The Commuter. But it does have that similar feel of a guy who is getting older kicking ass and oddly enough, always having a scene where he talks on the phone with the bad guy in his most threatening Irish accent.

The Commuter may not be Taken, but it is very similar to it, and movies like Non-Stop, Run All Night, A Walk Among the Tombstones, and The Grey.

The Commuter follows the story Michael MacCauley (played by Neeson). He is an ex-cop who now sells life insurance. Every day for the past ten years, he takes the same train into New York and the same train back to his home in the suburbs.

One day, on a particularly tough day for him, Michael is approached by a mysterious woman named Joanna (played by Vera Farmiga) and she gives him a task to find someone on the train in a certain amount of time. If he does that, he will be given 100,000 dollars. What follows is a suspenseful ride on this train as Michael uses his skills as a former cop to deduce who this person is, but also who wants them and why they need him to find them.

And overall, it's pretty cheesy and overall, pretty forgettable.

There is a pretty cool montage at the beginning of the movie where it depicts the daily routine of Michael how he is a pretty normal guy. Yeah he used to be a cop, but it's not like Taken where he was former CIA. Unlike his previous movies, while it does tap on Liam Neeson being old, he does come off as an older, less capable man who is "SIXTY YEARS OF AGE!".

That is an actual line in the movie and it's entertaining because these movies have almost started putting obligatory lines making fun of how old Liam Neeson is and how that usually doesn't match up with being an action hero. But he spends almost the entire movie walking back and forth, up and down this train to find the person he's expected to locate and all the while there are action sequences and heroic exchanges pull this guy who is supposed to be your everyday guy back into the image of Liam Neeson.

I've been making fun of this movie because I've basically said it is Taken on a train, but it feels more like a sequel to Non-Stop, a film Neeson did in 2014... which was basically Taken on a plane. Sooner or later, there's going to be an action movie with Liam Neeson solving mysteries on a boat and all the other odd forms of transportation.

I tweets about this film yesterday after I saw it and somebody mentioned that it does have somewhat of the same feeling Murder on the Orient Express had last year. Not only that it was on a train, but there was a little bit of a whodunit mystery to be solved. There is a cast of colorful characters in a small confined space and one old man who has the knowledge to solve this mystery.

I get that and yeah there are some similarities. But similar to my thoughts on Murder on the Orient Express, there isn't enough of an impact for me to really put this beyond a generic murder/conspiracy mystery. It's an entertaining movie. Murder on the Orient Express had better acting and was just a better movie overall, but very similar to it was, there was no impact. I won't remember this movie because the greatest thing in it was a fight sequence where Liam Neeson beat the crap out of a guy with a guitar. I don't like being the only person laughing in a theater... but yeah that was so dumb it was great!

Oh yeah, Patrick Wilson and Sam Neil are in this movie... it really looks like they were brought in for a week of shooting and were paid way too much for this movie.

So do I recommend The Commuter? Eh, sorta? It's not a bad movie, but it's also not very good. It's pretty much your generic action movie with Liam Neeson. Yeah there are some things I enjoyed for sure, but overall it didn't leave any kind of impact. If you're looking for a movie to kill some time, that was exactly what this movie did for me. But if you're only interested in going to find good movies, you can skip The Commuter. Watch Taken instead.

But what did you think of The Commuter? Comment and Discuss below! You can also send me your thoughts on Twitter @MovieSymposium as well as your requests for films I should review in the future. If you follow me on Twitter, you can get updates on future movie news and reviews coming out of this blog.

I'll leave you with this. I think I might have talked about this before, but I do love the relationship between Seth MacFarlane and Liam Neeson and I love it when they talk about it. Enjoy!