To paraphrase the immortal words of the amazing comedy duo Key and Peele, “Liam Neesons is my shiz !” And, he has been a quintessential part of this millenniums’ action movie landscape.
He has been Taken three times, fought off a pack of wild wolves, and dispatched of an almost infinite amount of baddies from across the globe. The Commuter, is his next turn as an over the hill butt kicker. He plays Micheal MacCauley, an ex-cop that gave up the badge for safer pastures as an insurance salesman. With his son going to college soon he’s running in to a bit of money trouble when one day a mysterious woman asks him would he do a small thing for $100,000. They ask him to find a person and plant a tracker on them. Without knowing what the consequences for his actions are will he let his money troubles cloud his morals or will integrity win out the day ?
It’s actually a a pretty straight forward movie. The mystery of what and why wasn’t hard to come by fairly early in the film. The who, however was a bit more challenging to come up with. Neeson as MacCauley has a train full of people to comb over and use his detective skills to narrow down his target. It does at times bring tension to the proceeding but not enough to have you on really drawn in to the plot. The action is fairly run of the mill. A lot of close up shots and tackling. These techniques are used due to the fact that Neeson is old, which the movie plays up a lot in the dialogue. It does, however, put a damper on the excitement of the fights. The acting is OK. It is an action movie and doesn’t require anything extraordinary to push it forward.
Long and short of it is, that The Commuter is simply another action movie in the library of Liam Neeson that wouldn’t make his greatest hits list. The fights shows that his age may be affecting the effectiveness of the action screen, but effort was definitely exerted to do what they could. Liam Neeson is still my guy for bad guy punching but, he may be Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon sooner than later.
