In "The Commuter," Liam Neeson plays Michael MacCauley, a former cop turned insurance salesman whose life has become a tolerable grind: up with the news on 1010 WINS, catch the Metro-North from Tarrytown to midtown, clock in eight hours, then take the evening train back to his wife, Karen (Elizabeth McGovern), and teenage son, Danny (Dean-Charles Chapman).
"You're a good soldier," Michael's boss says one day. While firing him.
With a start like this, you'd never know you were being set up for another compact little thriller by director Jaume Collet-Serra ("Non-Stop," "The Shallows"). Initially, the movie strikes an almost too-convincing note of middle-class struggle and late-life anxiety. "Karen and me, we live hand to mouth," Michael tells his implacable boss, then grows angry: "I'm 60 years of age!" It's a good reminder that although Neeson is now associated with quickie action movies, his intensity as a dramatic actor hasn't dimmed.
Eventually, "The Commuter" turns to the matter at hand: getting Michael involved in a dangerous plot that will unfold almost entirely on a speeding train. The catalyst is a beautiful woman, Joanna (Vera Farmiga), who sits across from Michael and casually poses a philosophical question: If someone offered you a lot of money to do something without ever knowing the outcome, would you do it? Joanna isn't being hypothetical, of course, and Michael is soon forced (with his family as leverage) to scour the train and locate a passenger he has never seen.
Collet-Serra's best movie to date, "Non-Stop," featured Neeson as Bill Marks, an air marshal trying to find a killer in the middle of a commercial flight. "Non-Stop" effectively boiled its ingredients down to the minimum, like a balsamic reduction of 1980s action flicks. "The Commuter," written by Byron Willinger and two others, isn't as satisfyingly simple. It requires a corruption scandal, an FBI agent, a GPS tracker and several tough-to-explain deaths just to keep its slim premise functioning. As for the mysterious passenger, Michael wonders, as we do: "What am I supposed to do with him when I find him?"
In the end, "The Commuter" feels both overstuffed and empty. Still, there are a handful of thrills, including a rugged fistfight that involves, for some reason, an electric guitar. Neeson and Collet-Serra have both made better movies. For a throwaway thriller, though, you could do worse than "The Commuter."
