In its hideously edited opening montage, The Commuter takes great pains to communicate that, yes, as per the film’s title, Liam Neeson’s cop turned insurance salesman has taken the commuter train to Manhattan every single day for the past 10 years. Unexpectedly, he is made redundant (“I’m 60 years of age, Frank!” he tells his boss), and his bad luck takes a turn for the worse when a mysterious woman (Vera Farmiga) chats him up on the commute home and asks if, hypothetically, he’d locate a passenger in exchange for a hefty wad of cash – or else she’ll have his family killed. Would you do it? That’s what she wants to know. As a thought experiment it’s kind of interesting. As the plot of a film? Frankly, it’s bonkers, and though it starts as a film about the financial crisis and America’s squeezed middle, it quickly turns into Murder on the Orient Express.
As far as storytelling is concerned, The Commuter is wildly inefficient, lacking basic narrative logic. Yet it’s hard not to derive some pleasure from watching Neeson fling himself about a rickety commuter train (and, in one set piece, precariously close to some train tracks), throwing insults at Goldman Sachs “on behalf of the American middle class”.
