In the last decade when Liam Neeson hasn’t been making “Taken” movies chances are good he’s been working with director Jaume Collet-Serra. In the past they’ve teamed for action b-movies “Run All Night,” “Unknown” and “Non-Stop.” This weekend they return to theatres with “The Commuter,” a terror-in-the-tube tale that is a mix of blue-collar action and Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train.”
Neeson plays retired NYPD detective turned recently downsized insurance agent Michael MacCauley. “Karen and me,” he says, “we live hand to mouth. We’ve got nothing to fall back on.” With debts mounting, a second mortgage and a son heading off to an expensive school in the fall, MacCauley is presented with an unusual proposition on his commuter train ride home from Manhattan to upstate New York. Mysterious stranger Joanna (Vera Farmiga) offers him $100,000 to do a simple job—find the new passenger on the train from the sea of faces he’s travelled with for the last decade and place a GPS on them. No strings attached. He doesn’t know the person nor will he ever know what happened to the person. “What kind of person are you?” she asks. If he says yes, his financial worries are over. Say no, however, and he risks the safety of everyone on the train and his family.
A better question would be, “What kind of movie is this?“ It’s not exactly fair to call it a thriller because there is very little in the way of actual thrills. After an effective opening montage that shows the drudgery of the 9 to 5 commuter’s life the film settles into very predictable beats as Neeson paces from car to car, desperation growing at every station stop. There’s a twist but as twists go it’s more of a straight line than a real bend in the plot.
This movie should have been called “Stereotypes on a Train.” Who could be the target? Is it the obnoxious businessman? The grizzled commuter? The teen doing an illegal errand for her boyfriend? I didn’t care and you probably won’t either. Things happen, bullets are fired and fists flung but the overly elaborate set-up—why didn’t the evil mastermind, who has absolute control over the situation, plant the GPS herself?—and clichéd dialogue doesn’t leave much room for interesting action.
Neeson certainly knows how to play the everyman with a special set of skills but he’s done it before and better in other movies. Formulaic in the extreme, “The Commuter” is as interesting as taking the same route home day after days for ten years.
Liam Neeson joins the mile high club in “Non-Stop.”
He plays Bill Marks, an aging U.S. federal air marshal safeguarding the 150 passengers (including Julianne Moore, Corey Stoll, Linus Roache and flight attendant Lupita Nyong’o) on an international flight from New York to London.
He’s also a burn-out, a lonely guy with a loaded gun and a propensity to get loaded on booze. The routine flight becomes fraught with danger when he receives text messages from a mysterious source threatening to kill a passenger every twenty minutes unless a ransom of $150 million is deposited into a bank account. When that account is discovered to be in Marks’s name he’s accused of being a hijacker.
“Non-Stop” has more red herrings than a fish and chips shop. Clues are dropped and discarded and the plot is so ludicrous that every now and again someone has to say, “I can explain this,” so the audience has a fighting chance of making some kind of sense of the intrigue. The story is simple but is muddied by outrageous twists. Once I decided to not try and play along—this isn’t “True Detective” where every word and scene counts—I enjoyed watching Neeson in action man mode. He’s better than the movie and he made this movie better simply by showing up.
There is a certain cheesy joy to be found in the image of Neeson floating in zero gravity, grabbing a gun out of the air and getting business done. Nothing can spice up a borderline action movie like the Flying Neeson Shot ™. He has carved a unique action niche for himself and seems to be having fun growling and gunning his way through trashy action movies.
Is “Non-Stop” great art? Nope, but did you really expect it to be? It’s the Neesonator after all.
Director Jaume Collet-Serra makes good use of the airplane’s small spaces, builds some nice scenes of claustrophobic tension and even makes a comment on how news organizations jump to conclusions, using conjecture instead of facts to fill the twenty-four hour wheel but story credibility is not his strong point.
Building tension, however, is. The movie is bookended by two terrific scenes. At the beginning Collet-Serra takes his time with the nicely shot boarding of the airplane sequence. Unease builds as the passengers, one of whom is a terrorist (not a spoiler, watch the trailer), take their seats.
The climax (SPOILER ALERT) is a typical ticking bomb sequence, but it’s an exciting one with cool visuals and the aforementioned Flying Neeson Shot ™.
The supporting cast is serviceable, in underwritten and generic roles. I hope Julianne Moore buys something nice with the pay cheque. She gets the job done, but that part could have been played by anyone. I feel worse for Lupita Nyong’o. She’s an Oscar nominee for “12 Years a Slave,” but here she’s reduced to a Grace Jones impersonator with just a few lines.
Despite a good pace and mounting tension, “Non-Stop is almost undone by superficial characters and a silly story. I say almost because it’s been Neesonized, the action movie equivalent of a sprinkle of fairy dust.
In the last decade when Liam Neeson hasn’t been making “Taken” movies chances are good he’s been working with director Jaume Collet-Serra. In the past they’ve teamed for action b-movies “Run All Night,” “Unknown” and “Non-Stop.” This weekend they return to theatres with “The Commuter,” a terror-in-the-tube tale that is a mix of blue-collar action and Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train.”
