Liam Neeson’s latest film is one train you might want to miss.
This weekend I decided to take my brother to the movies for an action-packed afternoon, but oh boy, we weren’t expecting this.
The movie follows a man named Michael MacCauley (Liam Neeson), an NYPD cop turned insurance salesman.
It opens with a beautiful montage of MacCauley’s monotonous daily commute. There was nothing out of the ordinary about his day until he is suddenly fired out of nowhere. Then, on his train ride back home, MacCauley is approached by a strange woman who offers him $100,000 to find “the person that does not belong in the train.” If he does not accept, she will kill his family (shocker).
MacCauley reluctantly agrees to her task, and he spends his commute looking for this intruder only to end up beaten up, shocked and confused.
Unfortunately, the movie is incoherent and dull with countless plot holes. The dialogue is weak and repetitive; the most important thing that MacCauley has to say is that he is 60 years old.
And I won’t even start on the lackluster green screen effects. The film’s special effects looked cheap and made us feel dizzy most of the time.
“I knew from the beginning what was going to happen,” said my brother, Arts and Sciences sophomore Virgilio Rodriguez. “I mean, it is a Liam Neeson movie, he is going to find them and probably kill them.”
However, not everything in the movie was terrible. The movie had a fantastic cast: Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson and Sam Neill are some of the actors featured in the film. But just because they are good actors does not mean that they delivered an excellent performance.
The star of the show had to be the movie editor, Nicholas de Toth. A review of “The Commuter” from The Chicago Sun-Times said, “Not a single one of them, nor Michael, nor anyone else, is capable of saving this movie from itself.” My brother and I wholeheartedly agree.
“The Commuter” was directed by Jaume Collet-Serra and written by Byron Willinger, Phil de Blas and Ryan Engle. And it’s still playing in theaters if you want to catch Neeson’s lastest action film.