The Commuter

Year: 2018
Director: Jaume Collet-Serra
Cast: Liam Neeson, Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Sam Neill


Plot: A recently laid off insurance salesman is approached by a mysterious woman on a commuter train, who offers him $100000 to find a specific passenger. He soon finds himself caught in a dangerous game where the lives of his family and the passengers on the train are on the line.


Review: The Commuter marks Liam Neeson's fourth collaboration with director Jaume Collet-Serra, after Unknown, Non-Stop and Run All Night. For me, each film was better than the previous one, but The Commuter just slightly misses the bar set by Run All Night.

In this film, Neeson plays Michael, a former cop turned insurance salesman who has just been laid off. On his way home, a woman named Joanna approaches him and persuades him to help her locate a specific passenger, giving him very vague clues to the passenger's identity. In exchange, he gets $100000. He doesn't think she's serious, until he actually finds the money in the restroom, right where she said it would be. But taking the money means agreeing to participate, and now he's forced to find the passenger, or his family will die. Michael realizes that these people are serious when people start getting killed around him.

The premise certainly feels a lot like Non-Stop, but it also shares similarity with another film: Nick Of Time starring Johnny Depp, in the sense that the protagonist is forced to do something so that the bad guys don't have to get their hands dirty. But unlike Depp, who was very much an everyman in that film, Neeson is a former cop here, which gives him a slight advantage in this situation, and thus takes the edge off the suspense a little. But to Neeson and Collet-Serra's credit, The Commuter turns out to be quite a ride from start to finish. Just like Non-Stop, Neeson has to find a person among many, which is part of the fun as he walks the audience through the process of elimination. Along the way, Neeson gets to throw hands and take names, and I gotta say, I've never seen him take this much of a beating in a movie before. But I sure am not complaining, because it's Liam Neeson, you know?

Neeson pretty much commands nearly every scene he's in, the film was tailor made for an action hero like him. Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson and Sam Neill all provide nice support as Joanna, Neeson's ex-partner and police chief respectively, but this is Neeson's movie through and through. Credit also goes to the cast who play the colorful passengers on the train, some of whom are quite familiar in type: the over friendly guy, the rude stock broker, a nurse, a girl in trouble with her ex-boyfriend, and a handful of suspicious looking guys. They all make their roles believable enough.

The Commuter falters slightly in the final act when the plot twist is much too obvious, but up to that point, Collet-Serra serves up a very entertaining film which culminates in a spectacular CGI sequence. I can't reveal much about it, though you might know if you've seen the trailers.

Overall, The Commuter is a lot of fun to watch. Granted, it doesn't stray too far from the kind of movies Liam Neeson makes these days. But who cares? There are movies that we go watch because we want to have fun at the theater and this is that kind of movie. (7.5/10)