Movie Review: The Commuter

The Commuter ** / *****

Directed by: Jaume Collet-Serra.

Written by: Byron Willinger & Philip de Blasi and Ryan Engle. 

Starring: Liam Neeson (Michael MacCauley), Vera Farmiga (Joanna), Patrick Wilson (Alex Murphy), Jonathan Banks (Walt), Sam Neill (Captain Hawthorne), Elizabeth McGovern (Karen MacCauley),  Killian Scott (Dylan), Shazad Latif (Vince), Andy Nyman (Tony), Clara Lago (Eva), Roland Møller (Jackson), Florence Pugh (Gwen), Dean-Charles Chapman (Danny MacCauley), Ella-Rae Smith (Sofia).

 

The Commuter is the latest entry in the Liam Neeson punches people genre – a genre that hasn’t really produced any good movies, but have basically been decent time wasters. He is teamed up with director Jaume Collet-Serra for the fourth time, but although I know I have seen the previous three – Unknown, Non-Stop and Run All Night – I also couldn’t give you a detailed breakdown of anything that happens in any of them (I don’t even remember the premise of Unknown if I’m being completely honest). So, walking into The Commuter, I really didn’t expect all that much – I was basically going because I commute every day on the train myself, so I kind of wanted to see how they made by every day life into an action movie. The film is a somewhat entertaining time waster for the first 70-80 minutes or so, but really does fly off the rails (literally) in the last act. It’s also got a somewhat downbeat, depressing tone to it, which it makes it harder for it to operate as a guilty pleasure than any movie involving Liam Neeson punching people on a train should be.

 

In the film, Neeson plays Michael MacCauley, a one-time cop, who gave that up to sell insurance – presumably because it was a safer and more lucrative job that being a cop was after his savings were wiped out in the 2008 Financial Crisis. Things finally seem to be close to be back on track again – his son is about to go to college, his marriage is basically okay, and while they aren’t rich, they are getting by. And then, one day, he gets fired – and his severance package isn’t even a payout, but rather an insurance policy (which, to an insurance company, is probably cheaper to get). He doesn’t know how he’s going to pay for anything, he doesn’t know how he’s going to tell his wife he’s out of a job – and someone just stole his cell phone. He’s trying to piece this altogether as he gets on his regular commuter train, from New York to somewhere outside the city – when an attractive woman (Vera Farmiga) sits down across from him. She tells him that if he can find someone on this train – someone who doesn’t belong – and places a tracking chip on their bag, he will get $100K. To prove she’s serious, she tells him to go to the bathroom, and find $25K hidden there. He does, and by doing so, essentially agrees to the terms of the deal. All he knows is that the person goes by the name of Prynne, and is getting off at Cold Springs – the last stop on the train.

 

The films opening scenes are filled with information we are sure will be relevant later – a news story about a city planner who recently killed himself, a train car with malfunctioning A/C, recognizable actors (Patrick Wilson, Sam Neill) in apparently meaningless roles, etc. And, of course, those all do become relevant along the commute – as Michael is able to piece together more and more of the story, and realizes just how in over his head he has gotten.

 

The film starts with an intriguing premise – and its best scene is the one between Neeson and Farmiga. It’s basically a premise like out of Richard Matheson’s The Box – do something, and you’ll get money, and someone you don’t know will get hurt. But the film really isn’t interested in that moral question – rather it just wants to get Neeson unravelling the mystery, and punching people. Like Non-Stop, it places him in an enclosed space – and sets him up to be the fall guy should something go wrong.

 

I enjoyed much of the movie, on its very limited level. Neeson is good at this type of film – he should be, he’s done enough of them – and its kind of fun to see him unravel the mystery, and get an applause moment by giving someone who works at Goldman Sachs the finger (the film knows it audience is basically working class white people, who whether they Trump or Sanders, hates Goldman Sachs). The film though feels the need to go from implausible and fun, to downright ridiculous in its last act – somehow even more so AFTER Neeson decouples a car from the train.

 

These movies are designed to be cheap, disposable counter programming in the cold winter months – something for adults to go to once they’ve seen the Oscar contenders, or for those who don’t give a crap about those Oscar contenders. You probably already know if you’ll like the movie or not, based on your feelings on the Liam Neeson punches people genre. There are no surprises here.

Movie Review: The Shallows

The Shallows
Directed by: Jaume Collet-Serra.
Written by: Anthony Jaswinski.
Starring: Blake Lively (Nancy), Óscar Jaenada (Carlos), Brett Cullen (Father), Sedona Legge (Chloe).

Horror films are probably the most personal genre in film – in the way that you cannot always rationally describe what makes some horror films scary, and some not, to different people. For example, while I can appreciate a good ghost story in film – and they can scare me in the moment, they usually do not end up haunting my dreams, simply because I don’t believe in ghosts (the exception is Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining – the greatest horror film ever made, and of course, it may not be a ghost story at all). However, even the lamest of home invasion horror films will scare the crap out of me – especially since I became a father. Something about someone invading my home – the place where I should be the safest – scares me to death, and these films (like the French film Ils or the underrated The Strangers) stay with me for years after I have seen them. Another example, which dates back to my childhood when I saw Steven Spielberg’s Jaws way too young, is shark movies. I was scared my entire childhood of being eaten by a shark – even when I was in a swimming pool, and I knew that fear was completely irrational. It’s a fear that has never left me – which is probably why I enjoy cheesy films like Deep Blue Sea (1999) so much, and why the low budget Open Water (2003) remains one of the scariest films of the new millennium so far.

Jaume Collet-Serra’s The Shallows is actually kind of a combination between those two films – it has some of Open Water’s paranoia, trapping one person (in Open Water it was two, but still), in one location, chased by shark (or sharks) for its entire running time, but it has some of the big budget cheese of Deep Blue Sea – an obviously CGI shark, bloody deaths, and an unlikely climax that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but damn if it isn’t fun.

Like many films of this kind, the film opens with idyllic beauty – a young woman, Nancy (Blake Lively) is on vacation in Mexico, and wants to go surfing at the same hidden beach her mother did 25 years ago when she found out she was pregnant with her. The movie gives Nancy more backstory than she needs – about death and giving up and yada yada yada, apparently because the film believes you won’t believe the fight Nancy puts up without that backstory – as if simply trying to fight off a giant shark isn’t enough. The beach is isolated – she is dropped off by a helpful stranger, and there are only two other surfers there. As they are packing up to go, Nancy decides to catch one more wave – and makes a mistake. She drifts too far – almost right on top of the bloated, floating corpse of a giant whale – which of course has attracted the attention of a giant shark. Now that she has entered that sharks feeding zone, he’s pissed, and determined to kill her. She is able to get to a rock that will protect her – but only until high tide, and then she’s screwed.

The film runs only 87 minutes, and to be honest, that’s a little long for the film – a 70 minute film could have been leaner and tauter, and perhaps even more terrifying for everything it didn’t show. Part of the Hollywood machine however requires that if you’re going to make a movie about a giant shark, that sharks has to eat some people, so the film throws in a few unnecessary characters basically as chum – and although I admired the way director Jaume Collet-Serra handled those deaths – mainly, he doesn’t belabor them (the first death really is brilliantly handled, and could have worked in a more stripped down version of this story). The weakest moments of the film are when the shark itself is visible as more than just a dorsal fin or a shadow – it’s not an especially convincing CGI creation, especially as the film moves along, and requires more face-to-face interaction with Lively.

For her part, Lively is terrific in the film – the best I’ve ever seen her really. You can be cynical and say she was only cast because of how she looks in a bikini – which is great by the way, or because of her butt – which gets at least as much screen time as her face in the first third of the film, as the camera never misses a chance to lovingly frame it as she paddles out on her surf board, or changes into her wetsuit, etc. Yet, even if that was the reason for her casting, Lively handles everything in this performance amazingly well – this is a physical performance as much as anything, and one that requires her to spend a lot of time by herself, and quiet (the film may have worked even better if she was quiet more – her asides either to herself or to her seagull friend Steven – are mostly unnecessary, and assume the audience will be too dim to get what she’s thinking otherwise). It is a quietly intense performance, and an effective one, that keeps the film afloat, even when it drifts too far into CGI spectacle.

The film did scare me quite a bit – as I said, I am petrified of sharks – even though when I think about it, The Shallows isn’t really a horror film, as much as a survival film – it’s more All is Lost or The Revenant than it is Jaws or Open Water. It is a remarkably simple film – but an effective one. If the filmmakers had simplified it even more, it would have been even better.

Movie Review: Run All Night

Run All Night
Directed by: Jaume Collet-Serra.
Written by: Brad Ingelsby.
Starring: Liam Neeson (Jimmy Conlon), Ed Harris (Shawn Maguire), Joel Kinnaman (Mike Conlon), Boyd Holbrook (Danny Maguire), Bruce McGill (Pat Mullen), Genesis Rodriguez (Gabriela Conlon), Vincent D'Onofrio (Detective Harding), Lois Smith (Margaret Conlon), Common (Andrew Price), Beau Knapp (Kenan Boyle), Patricia Kalember (Rose Maguire), Daniel Stewart Sherman (Brendan), James Martinez (Detective Oscar Torres).

Had Run All Night been made in the 1970s – by a director like William Friedkin – it may well have been a great, dark, gritty, violent thriller. It feels like that is what the movie wants to be – and had it been directed like that, it could have been great. The problem is that they hired Jaume Collet-Serra to direct, and Liam Neeson to star in the film, and the pair of them want to treat the film like the flashy, modern thrillers they have collaborated on before – Unknown (2011) and Non-Stop (2014). That’s the wrong tone for the movie, and ruins what could have been a gritty little entertainer.

In the film, Neeson stars as Jimmy Conlon – a onetime mob enforcer, now drowning himself in alcohol and regret. His childhood friend, Shawn Maguire (Ed Harris) is a powerful mob boss, who continue to support Jimmy. They both have adult sons – Mike (Joel Kinnaman), is Jimmy’s son, and wants nothing to do with him and his way of life, while Danny (Boyd Holbrook) is following Shawn into the business. A series of coincidences and violence, ends with Danny dead, by Jimmy`s hand, and Shawn sending his minions after both father and son, who are forced to band together, and try to survive one long night.

The film works best when it doesn’t seem to be trying very hard. The whole movie takes place at night, and the visual look mirrors the darkness of the themes of violence passed down from one generation to the next. This is the type of thing that has been done in countless crime movies before this one – but it’s been done that often, because it works. When the film calms down, and simply allows Jimmy and Shawn – and to a lesser extent Mike – just be themselves.

The film missteps though in the action sequences. The action sequences take what is otherwise a dark thriller, and puts a high gloss sheen on them that doesn’t work. Not only that, but Jimmy, who has been setup to be rather pathetic, a shell of his former self, all of a sudden turned into the Neeson of the Taken movies.

Run All Night would have been smart to take its lead from last year`s indie, revenge drama Blue Ruin – Jeremy Saulnier`s brilliant, violent film where the violence comes on suddenly, is bloody, but also clumsy. What they do instead, is stage them like a typical action movie, and it simply doesn’t work.

There have been a lot of jokes about Neeson, the action star, in the last few years – many of them are deserved, as the Taken movies, along with Unknown and Non-Stop are pretty bad. But there have been some gems as well – like Joe Caranhan’s The Grey, about Neeson and wolves, or last years A Walk Among the Tombstones, by Scott Frank. Had one of them directed Run All Night, I have a feeling the film could have been wonderful. In the hands of Collet-Serra, it becomes yet another film where Neeson shows off his very special skills.

Movie Review: Non-Stop

Non-Stop
Directed by: Jaume Collet-Serra.
Written by: John W. Richardson & Christopher Roach and Ryan Engle.
Starring: Liam Neeson (Bill Marks), Julianne Moore (Jen Summers), Scoot McNairy (Tom Bowen), Michelle Dockery (Nancy), Nate Parker (Zack White), Corey Stoll (Austin Reilly), Lupita Nyong'o (Gwen), Omar Metwally (Dr. Fahim Nasir), Jason Butler Harner (Kyle Rice), Linus Roache (David McMillan), Shea Whigham (Agent Marenick), Anson Mount (Jack Hammond).

Liam Neeson’s late career transformation into an action star really is kind of strange. He hadn’t done many action films until he was around 60 – building his reputation as a “serious actor” in films like Schindler’s List and Michael Collins. Around 1999, he started what I called the “doomed mentors” phase of his career – appearing in films like George Lucas’ The Phantom Menace, Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven and Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins – often briefly, giving the younger protagonist a mentor to look up to briefly, before being killed off. It really wasn’t until 2008’s Taken – when the actor was 56 – that he became an action star with a “very specific set of skills”. That’s about the age – or honestly a little past it – that audiences start laughing at most action stars, who either have to reinvent themselves as character actors (Bruce Willis) or keep plugging away at nostalgia products, that we all know are ridiculous, but kind of enjoy anyway (Sylvester Stallone). It’s become almost an annual tradition that we’re going to get an early year Neeson action film – even though other than The Grey (2011) – none of them have been very good. What’s the key to Neeson’s success in these films – which all make money, and audiences seem to enjoy even if they admit they’re kind of silly? I think it’s that he seems to take them seriously enough that it allows the audience to buy the admittedly silly premises, but not so seriously that the films get bogged down in an unearned sense of self-importance. I haven’t really liked many of these Neeson programmers – but I like him in them. He does indeed have a very specific skill set that seems to work for them.

Non-Stop has a silly premise even by the standards of these recent Neeson vehicles. He plays Bill Marks – an Air Marshall who flies around the world in first class, undercover to prevent any future hijackings (the movie shows various clips of talking heads on TV, all of whom seem to be ripping how much the Air Marshalls make, and how much the program costs – is this a real debate?). He’s settling in for a long flight from New York to London, when he gets a text on his secure network. It wants $150 million wired into a bank account, or else the texter says that they’ll kill one person on board every 20 minutes. Neeson tries to get others – his partner, the captain, the intelligence agents on the ground – to listen to him, but no one quite believes the threat is real. How could anyone possibly think they could get away with something like that? But people do start dying – but by then, it’s too late to turn around – and all the evidence suggests that it is Bill Marks himself who is hijacking the plane. No one really believes him except for Jen Summers (Julianne Moore) – his seat partner.

The film is a twist on the old genre of the “country house murder” when a sleuth like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot would be faced with solving a mysterious murder, when all the suspects are stuck in the same place for an extended period of time. This is somewhat complicated in Non-Stop by the fact that they don’t have a dozen suspects, who dwindle as one after another get bumped off – but hundreds of suspects aboard the packed flight. Naturally, as an audience member you start playing “spot the killer” – and you do so by figuring out who in the supporting cast you recognize (Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary tells us that a star who has seemingly no reason to be in a movie always turns out to be the killer). At least in Non-Stop, the supporting cast is filled with recognizable faces – Corey Stoll, Scoot McNairy, Nate Parker, Michelle Dockery, Linus Roach, Lupita Nyong’o, and of course Julianne Moore – so it really is impossible to tell who the killer is going to be – unless you get lucky when you take your wild guess. You never for a second believe that Neeson is actually behind it all – the evidence is just too perfect for that.

Neeson does his job fine in the movie – once again showing his patented grim determination to get the job done (and yes, Neeson’s grim determination is much different than Tom Cruise’s patented fierce determination). He holds the movie together when it should fly apart at the seams for sheer ridiculousness. I had to wonder when I watched the movie though if the whole thing could have been avoided had Neeson simply ignored the texts – which everyone told him to do. I thought the same thing as I watched the first few episodes of the TV show The Following (before I gave up, as the show got increasingly stupid). If Kevin Bacon simply chose not to get involved, wouldn’t the killer’s plan fall apart? The same question entered my mind when watching Non-Stop as well – but I guess that wouldn’t be overly dramatic.

Non-Stop isn’t a very good movie. Director Jaume Collet-Serra, who also helmed Unknown starring Neeson a few years ago, knows how to make a movie, and it moves as a brisk pace and is watchable throughout. It’s a decent enough time waster, although it never really develops into anything more. In short, it’s like all the other early year Neeson action films except for The Gray – which was a legitimately great movie. The rest are ones you watch, kind of enjoy, and then immediately forget.

Movie Review: Unknown

Unknown **
Directed by: Jaume Collet-Serra.
Written By: Oliver Butcher & Stephen Cornwell based on the novel Out of My Head by
Didier Van Cauwelaert.
Starring: Liam Neeson (Dr. Martin Harris), Diane Kruger (Gina), January Jones (Elizabeth Harris), Aidan Quinn (Martin B.), Bruno Ganz (Ernst Jürgen), Frank Langella (Rodney Cole), Sebastian Koch (Professor Bressler).

Alfred Hitchcock casts a large shadow over the thriller genre – one that is pretty much impossible to overcome. He was, without a doubt, one of the most influential filmmakers in history. And yet, what is odd about his films is that the work great – perhaps even better – when you know the secrets of the movie. I think I got more out of Notorious, Vertigo, Psycho, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window and the rest of his masterpieces the second time through then the first time. That is precisely why most thrillers today cannot measure up to the ones made by Hitchcock. They are all plot driven – they all try so damned hard to pull the rug out from under you with its twists and turns that none of them really create any real suspense, and none of them really make us care what happens to its characters. They are merely pawns in the director’s game.

Take the new thriller Unknown for example – a film that if you have read anything from the filmmakers or the cast, you will have heard Hitchcock’s name come up repeatedly. They are really trying very hard to emulate the master here. The problem is that the movie spends more time misdirecting us from its surprises than it does setting up its characters. The characters in Hitchcock movies were driven by some sort of deep psychological need or deviance – the characters in Unknown are simply driven by an overwritten screenplay.

The basic plot concerns Dr. Martin Harris (Liam Neeson) who travels to Berlin with his beautiful, much younger wife Elizabeth (January Jones). They arrive at the hotel, only to have Harris realize he left his briefcase at the airport. He gets into a cab driven by Gina (Diane Kruger) to go back – but gets into a traffic accident, and wakes up in the hospital four days later. What’s odd is that his wife never bothered to look for him – and when he returns to the hotel, and finds her at a party, she says she doesn’t know him – and introduces another man (Aidan Quinn) as her husband – Dr. Martin Harris. The “real” Harris tries to piece everything together, bringing Gina back into the fold to help him unravel what happened (why she agrees is a mystery the movie never bothers to explain), as well as an old Stasi officer named Jurgen (Bruno Ganz). He doesn’t like what he uncovers.

Neeson doesn’t have the right feel to him in this role. Hitchcock always cast actors he knew the audience would immediately like – Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, etc – so he wouldn’t have to make them likable. But Neeson isn’t one of those actors, and his hero is rather bland. Even worse is January Jones, who tries very hard to be the icy blonde that Hitchcock loved, but turns out just to be boring. Diane Kruger fares better – essentially taking on the Eva Marie Saint role from North by Northwest, but Saint had a reason to help Cary Grant, something this movie never supplies Kruger, so it leaves a hole in her character that she cannot file. The other truly great performance in the movie belongs to Bruno Ganz – that great German actor, who fills his role as the form Stasi agent to perfection. His scene with Frank Langella, another aging spy, is truly great, and belongs in another movie – one that deserves these two great talents, not this one.

It may seem unfair of me to spend so much time comparing this film to the work of Alfred Hitchcock. After all, Hitchcock was a master filmmaker – one of the best in history, and the director of this film, Jaume Collet-Serra is just starting out (although his last film, Orphan, truly was a wonderful Hitchcockian thriller about an evil little girl). But when a movie tries as hard as unknown does to be a Hitchcock thriller – and comes up so short, I don’t know how else to review the film. The filmmakers made the comparison first – and I’m just pointing out just how short of their aims this movie falls.

Movie Review: Orphan

Orphan ***
Directed By: Jaume Collet-Serra.

Written By: David Johnson.

Starring: Vera Farmiga (Kate Coleman), Peter Sarsgaard (John Coleman), Isabelle Fuhrman (Esther), CCH Pounder (Sister Abigail), Jimmy Bennett (Daniel Coleman), Margo Martindale (Dr. Browning), Karel Roden (Dr. Värava), Aryana Engineer (Max Coleman).

I cannot remember the last movie child that was as creepy as Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman) is in Orphan. Not even the title character in Joshua, the best creepy child movie of the decade, is as downright scary as Esther. (In Joshua’s defense at least a part of this is because that film was more ambigious about just how evil Joshua was, if at all). Even in her first scene in the film, where she is all innocence and light, there seems to be something missing in Esther that the rest of us have.

Esther is the film’s most complex and fascinating character, but she is hardly the only interesting one. Kate (Vera Farmiga) is a woman who probably should not have been allowed to adopt Esther in the first place. She is a recovering alcoholic with less than a year sober, still reeling for the death of one of her daughters at birth, and an accident that almost killed another of her kids. But she and her husband John (Peter Sarsgaard) have lots of money, so that probably helped to smooth the way.

So when Kate and John bring Esther home, they think that she will complete their family. And for a while things seem to go well, but soon Kate starts to think that there is some wrong with Esther. When she is around John, she is sweet and innocent, but when John is not around; Esther can be less than perfect. There is nothing that Kate can pin on her, but just always seems to be around when bad things happen. Farmiga, who essentially played this same role in Joshua, does a fine job here again. As always, Sarsgaard brings a degree of complexity that often seems to be missing in roles like his.

But it is Fuhrman who is really outstanding. Many child actors overdo a role like this, but Fuhrman perfectly captures her psychopath of a character. She is very convincing, both when she lies, and when she lets her mask down and allows us to see the real person underneath. She is great in the film - one of the best child actors I have seen in years.

The movie that surrounds these performances is predictable and a little sloppy near the end, where it devolves into a series of frantic chases and fights scenes, and of course the killer who keeps coming back to life long past the point when a normal person would have died. But director Jaume Collet-Serra is talented, and the visual look of the film is dark, but visually alive. The scenes involving the black light in particular are wonderful.

Orphan is a film with so many good things in it, that I am willing to overlook some of the things that do no work. I wish the writers had found a better way to end the film, instead of recycling one cliché after another. But since the clichés are so well executed, I hardly care. Orphan is an uncommonly good American horror film.