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France, United States · 2018
Rated PG-13 · 1h 44m
Director Jaume Collet-Serra
Starring Liam Neeson, Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Jonathan Banks
Genre Action, Thriller
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An insurance salesman, on his daily commute home, meets a mysterious woman. Suddenly, he is unwittingly caught up in a criminal conspiracy that carries life-and-death stakes for everyone on the train.
Perhaps you can’t ask too much from a modest, mid-range crowd-pleaser like this, but the experience ends up something like a commuter service itself: you know where it’s going and it gets you there perfectly well, but in a few years’ time you’d be hard pressed to distinguish it from dozens of similar journeys.
Collet-Serra’s fourth team-up with Neeson, The Commuter, represents neither man’s finest work, but at its best, it suggests the snap and fun they’ve brought us before.
This may be a forgettable movie about the forgotten man — a blue-collar morality play disguised as a very contrived hostage crisis — but at least it’s shlock with something on its mind.
The Commuter’s breakneck incoherence — not to mention a generally dour demeanor, shorter on incidental humor than most of the helmer’s work — makes it a notch less fun than those previous ex-trash-aganzas.
New York Daily News by Joe Dziemianowicz
As it speeds along, the film delivers its share of popcorn-style entertainment, curves and thrills. But it stalls due to plot holes and murky storytelling, willful inaccuracies (like an invented Upper East side train station), wasted talent and conductor’s cap tips to better railway-based movies like “Strangers on a Train,” “The Fugitive” and “Unstoppable.”
The Hollywood Reporter by Jordan Mintzer
It's a certified B-movie without superheroes or interplanetary travel, drawing its power from a whodunit, race-against-the-clock scenario that plays as if The Lady Vanishes and Strangers on a Train were chopped up and tossed into the blender along with a slab of CGI and a full bottle of Dexedrine.
If Collet-Serra put Neeson on a merry-go-round and added some danger, I’d gladly show up.
An action picture whose aging hero we care about and root for, a thriller with tension and style, a B-movie Hitchcock would have been happy to call his own.
Screen International by Sarah Ward
What The Commuter lacks in nuance, depth, surprises, logic and serviceable dialogue...it can’t make up for in its effective single-location tension or well-choreographed action, though both rank among the film’s modest highlights.
It’s a zingy set-up but just as quickly, it hits the skids.
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This was just the thrill I needed during a time where nothing seems to be happening. Liam Neeson seems to have returned to his Taken days as although a decade later, he's still as sharp as a knife. Perhaps cliche in its storyline, the action in the film is what will keep you watching.