The film comes alive, though, in its moments of action, which occasionally suffer from sloppy editing when tracking some of the more fantastical setpieces, but are overall creative and very well choreographed. It’s also pretty obvious who the mystery person ends up being if you’ve ever seen one of these red herring capers before, but at the very least the cast of oddball suspects is entertaining enough in their own right to carry the movie through the necessary steps. The organization threatening Michael and his family is only ever identified insofar as they probably spell They with a capital T, and it’s a pretty odd detail for them to be as apparently omniscient as they are yet still require the rogue element of Michael to track down this mysterious person.
While on the ride home on the commuter train, he is approached by a strange woman who proposes a hypothetical: if he could track down one person on the train who doesn’t seem to belong and identify them with a GPS tracking device, would he do so with the promise of a $100,000 reward, regardless of the unknown consequences to the identified party? This scenario quickly proves to not be hypothetical, and Michael is caught up in a search for the unknown person as a manipulating presence monitors him and threatens to harm his family if he doesn’t comply.įinding the fun in The Commuter largely depends on your ability to ignore glaring plot holes and cope with a plot structured around some fairly obvious red herrings. Michael MacCauley (Neeson) is an ex-cop who just lost his job as an insurance salesman, leaving his family in dire financial straits. The Commuter is the latest of such pieces of Dad Cinema, and though it has a strikingly dumb story to tell, it achieves its primary goal of being a delightful action romp. It’s an evolution of the save-the-princess model of storytelling, only refitted to aging suburbanite pop culture fans who still want to feel like Han Solo or Clint Eastwood, and it’s a niche that Liam Neeson has found himself very comfortable in.
Almost every film in Neeson’s action career has been focused on a family patriarch, down on his luck but not without his particular sets of skills, protecting his family from a threat to their lives or safety in a bid to prove that even as he sets on in years that he’s still capable of being a beacon of masculine stability for his family unit. Liam Neeson has built his late career around being your dad, or rather, the power fantasy that your dad wishes he were.
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