The Commuter [2018] Full HD Movie Free Download
I did care very much about Neeson's character, though, thanks mainly to his
mastery of the same "just say your lines and hit your marks" style of
film acting. No matter who he's playing in these movies, he always attacks the
problem at hand with the low-key focus of a guy trying really hard to open a
stuck jar of jam. It's my considered opinion that Neeson's late-career brand of
business class dad machismo has yet to meet a director that can fully do it
justice, but reasonable minds may differ. In any case, it's doubtful that any
will be debating the fine points of his late-career filmography when Michael is
hanging underneath a moving train like Indiana Jones, or breaking the little
glass box at the end of a car so that he can use the hammer on someone's skull.
Neeson plays Michael MacCauley, insurance
broker and family man (although they might as well just name his character Liam
Neeson). He’s caught the same Hudson line commuter train for 10 years; except
this time Vera Farmiga elegantly plonks herself
into the seat opposite and makes Neeson an offer he could refuse but doesn’t:
find one person on the train based on their destination and nickname, plant a
tracking device on their bag, and she’ll give him $100,000. He’s just lost his
job, so why not? As an added incentive, Farmiga tells him they’ll kill his wife
and son if he refuses or fails.
The
Commuter is almost identical — at least in structure — to their previous
collaborations — Unknown, Non-Stop and Run All Night, all varying degrees of
good. It’s a film that’s built on a clever premise, executed with absolute
efficiency, but (in this case, quite literally) derailed in its final act
because of some utterly preposterous writing.
Consider
this: an innocent commuter (Jonathan Banks from Breaking Bad) who alerts
MacCauley about the woman’s intentions, is pushed to his death. An FBI agent is
also murdered and soon enough, MacCauley’s wife, Karen (Elizabeth McGovern),
and son, Danny (Dean-Charles Chapman), are also on the hitlist. Does this sound
familiar? Perish the thought. As Joanna warns Maccauley, “we have eyes and ears
everywhere.” Really? Never you mind.
The Commuter’s opening
montage is far more artful than one might ever expect from a mid-budget action
thriller coming out in January, playing out Michael’s daily routine over and
over again in a series of cross-cutting scenes. We see him drive to the station
with his wife, banter with his son about the book of the month they’re reading
together, and say hi to his fellow passengers on the train. The viewer can spot
little differences each time (he’s in a rush one day, he’s bickering with his
wife on another) while also buying into that comforting sense of sameness.
On the downside, The
Commuter is in such a hurry to reach its destination without delay, there’s no
time to enjoy the view. It’s so stripped down, the characters are mostly
ciphers and there’s little in the way of leavening humour or unexpected
detours. 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.
In his fourth action-thriller outing with Spanish director Jaume
Collet-Serra, Neeson shows his mettle in a tension-ridden but implausible story
which could have been stronger had the scriptwriters fleshed out characters
like the mysterious Joanna or the hero’s ex colleague cops Murphy (Patrick
Wilson) and Capt. Hawthorne (Sam Neill) MacCauley’s fellow commuters are
an interesting lot: a nasty stockbroker (Shazad Latif) a paramedic who has
broken up with her boyfriend, an intern who witnesses the murder of a mentor, a
young punk with a bag full of fake ids…
In the hands of
Collet-Serra, The Commuter is an effortlessly mounted thriller that’s
infinitely better than those terrible Taken sequels. For instance, there is one
action scene in particular that seems as though it is a direct response to that
endlessly memed sequence from Taken 3 in which the visibly old Neeson leaps a
fence with the aid of a dozen cuts: it’s an entire fistfight that (with the
obvious help of some seamless editing) is made to appear as if it were shot in
one long take.
By
now, it’s obvious that there’s no point shooting holes in the plots of these
movies. You’d only be ruining what is — as much as I detest saying this — were
the mind to be slightly dulled, a reasonably enjoyable experience -- although
even the slightest display of intelligence will almost certainly dismantle the
very tracks upon which The Commuter runs.
Much
like with Collet-Serra and Neeson’s previous collaboration Non-Stop(which was set entirely on an airplane), there’s an Agatha
Christie element to The Commuter’s
plot. The film is light on action set pieces (at least, until the last 20
minutes, when things really go to hell) and heavy on tense, loaded
conversations with passengers. Forget Murder
on the Orient Express, this is Vague
Mystery on the Hudson Line, with Michael playing the part of a sweaty
Hercule Poirot who’s at the end of his rope. Michael knows his pals, the
regular riders of the train, aren’t of interest to Joanna—she’s looking for
someone who doesn’t belong. From there, it becomes a process of elimination.
The
Commuter isn’t the blazing swansong every Liam Neeson fan would’ve hoped for —
and to be quite honest, with these things, you never know; he might do another
action movie sometime in the future. But it has, like it’s central character, a
workmanlike demeanour that’s bound to please its fans. There are even brief
moments of depth, if you’re into that sort of thing: banks, and the evil they
represent, is a recurring motif.
Without spoiling anything, I regret to inform you that as usual,
the mystery was ruined for me based only on the casting. If you get the hint,
then you understand what a pain this trend is, but if you don’t, lucky you.
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