Liam Neeson boards a train, a stranger makes him an offer, and somewhere in the next 104 minutes a man goes under a bus. That is the shape of The Commuter, the 2018 action thriller from director Jaume Collet-Serra, and it is a shape you have seen before.
Trailer, via Lionsgate Movies.
Michael MacCauley Loses His Job
Neeson plays Michael MacCauley, a former NYPD officer now working as an insurance agent. He rides the same Hudson Line train from Tarrytown to Grand Central Terminal every day.
Then he is laid off. His family’s finances are suddenly at risk. He does not tell his wife Karen, played by Elizabeth McGovern, or his son. Instead he confides in Murphy, his old partner, played by Patrick Wilson.
On the ride home, a woman named Joanna sits down across from him.
Vera Farmiga Makes a Hypothetical Offer
Farmiga’s Joanna frames the whole thing as a thought experiment. She asks Michael to find “Prynne,” an alias for a passenger she says is carrying a stolen item.
The terms are concrete. There is $25,000 waiting in the bathroom, and another $75,000 when the job is done. She hints that she knows he used to be a cop, then leaves the car.
Michael finds the money. He tries to walk off the train with it.
A Wedding Ring and a Bus
A teenager stops him with an envelope. Inside is his wife’s wedding ring. The message is a warning.
He cannot reach Karen by phone. He writes a note on Walt’s newspaper asking the man to call the police. Walt is played by Jonathan Banks.
Joanna calls and threatens Michael and his family. She tells him the train is full of hidden cameras. Then she tells him to look outside, where Walt is pushed in front of a moving bus and killed.
The GPS Tracker and the Conductor
Joanna directs Michael to a GPS tracker in his jacket. He is meant to plant it on Prynne.
He tries a workaround. He persuades a conductor to run random security searches by claiming he has seen suspicious activity among the passengers.
The plan collapses fast. When the conductor moves to search a woman’s bag, she protests loudly. A man bolts from the car. Michael follows him, gets attacked, and plants the tracker on him anyway.
What The Commuter Actually Is
The cast is deep for this kind of film. Alongside Neeson, Farmiga, Wilson, Banks, McGovern and Sam Neill as Captain Hawthorne, the supporting ranks include Killian Scott, Shazad Latif, Andy Nyman, Colin McFarlane, Roland Møller and Florence Pugh as Gwen.
The tagline is “Lives are on the line,” and the film means it literally.
The Commuter premiered in New York City on January 8, 2018. Lionsgate released it in the United States on January 12, and StudioCanal released it in the United Kingdom on January 19. It grossed $119 million worldwide. Critics gave it mixed reviews, calling it similar to Neeson and Collet-Serra’s earlier collaboration Non-Stop while praising Neeson’s performance and the genre thrills.
A Train, a Timer, a Neeson
Collet-Serra and Neeson had done this before. That comparison is not a critic’s invention — it is the film’s own problem. The setup here is a closed box with a countdown, which is the same machinery as Non-Stop, just moved from a plane to a commuter line.
The pieces that work:
- Neeson’s performance, which holds the center when the plot starts handing him coincidences.
- The premise itself, which is clean and gets moving quickly.
- Farmiga’s single scene, which is the best-constructed sequence in the film.
The pieces that do not:
- The conspiracy, which keeps adding layers it cannot pay off.
- The action, which is competent but never surprising.
- The third act, which trades the film’s one good idea for noise.
Where the 104 Minutes Go
The Commuter runs 104 minutes across three genres — action, thriller, mystery — and it is only ever really good at one of them, and only for about twenty minutes.
The mystery is the interesting part. A man on a train, an alias, a passenger he has to identify, a tracker he has to plant. That is a puzzle with rules, and rules are what make a thriller tense. The film sets those rules up carefully and then stops respecting them, which is the actual failure here. Once Michael starts improvising his way around Joanna’s terms, the audience stops counting and starts waiting.
The action is the least interesting part, which is strange for a film built around a man who used to be a cop. Walt’s death is the one image that lands, and it lands because it is sudden and public and cheap. Nothing after it matches that.
The Case for a Watchable Film
This is a mid-tier entry in the Neeson-Collet-Serra run, and it knows it. The film is not lazy — the casting is generous, the premise is tight, and the early going does its job. But in this paper’s view it front-loads its best material and then asks Neeson to carry the rest on presence alone.
He mostly can. That is the whole case for The Commuter: a star, a train, a timer, and a director who knows how to keep all three moving. It is not enough for a good film. It is enough for a watchable one.
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