Liam Neeson is the AARP action-hero extraordinaire—a fit older gentleman who isn’t looking for a fight but will give worse than he gets in any confrontation. He’s back again in The Commuter, this time as Mike MacCauley, a just laid-off insurance salesman whose ride home from Manhattan on the commuter train turns into a war of survival for his family, the passengers and, although this seems last on his mind, himself.
The tightly wound plot works well enough for the first three-quarters of The Commuter. A mysterious stranger who calls herself Joanna (Vera Farmiga) approaches Mike on the train where he’s absorbed in reading The Grapes of Wrath. She seems bright and personable (a psychology grad student conducting an exercise?) when she asks, “What kind of person are you? What if I asked you to do one thing?” That thing sounds like a game: If Mike finds a hidden package containing $25,000, he then agrees to find “someone on this train who does not belong”—a person we’ll call Prynne, and plant a GPS tracker in his bag or on his person.
Searching, he finds the packet of $100 bills, and like Farley Granger in Strangers on a Train, discovers that Joanna’s proposition is deadly business. She is adamant: “No one forced you to take that money,” she says, needling him by cellphone after exiting the train “You accepted the offer,” she insists with calm malice, and she plans to hold him to her devil’s bargain.
The story goes off the rails in the final stretch. But along the way, The Commuter is an essay in paranoia and corruption set against the shattered backdrop of the American Dream. As the story begins, Mike, 60, is let go from his company in a cost-saving measure. He thought he did everything right—the loving wife, the nice if double-mortgaged suburban home and the son whose tuition at Syracuse he struggles to afford. And then it’s all over with no prospects. Director Jaume Collet-Serra (who previously worked with Neeson in Unknown) opens The Commuter with a well-edited montage of Mike’s day-in day-out, wake-up alarm and train ride to work as seasons pass. Everyone he talks to on his way to the office is chalking up the remaining years like prisoners scratching on the walls of their cells.
The Commuter is especially harsh with Wall Street, embodied by one of the train’s passengers, an arrogant young broker. “We don’t represent people like you,” he tells Mike, his disdain for the middle class undisguised. The broker’s ringtone is Richard Wagner.
Trapped in a moving train with a mission he doesn’t want, Mike is handed an envelope by a stranger containing his wife’s wedding ring. “I can get to anyone anywhere,” Joanna reminds him on her next call. The Commuter works as a nightmare, as absurd at times as a bad dream but just as palpably suffocating in the sweaty confinement of that crowded train. As the puzzle comes together, the big surprises seem less surprising. Still, there are many unsettling moments. A ringing cellphone from beneath the trap door on the train carriage reveals a corpse. Even the dead can’t escape unwanted calls.
