Rehan Ally
Online Editor
Liam Neeson brings returns to the big screen yet again in another action packed crime drama in his new film, The Commuter. Neeson plays his beloved role of the protective father/husband who must use his special skills to save his family and the others who have been put in danger.
In this film, Neeson is an ex-cop named Michael McCauley who just got fired from his office job. He has ridden the commuter train to that job, every day for the past ten years. One day, a mysterious woman named Joanna, played by Vera Farmiga, approaches him on the train interrupts his normal commute.
She asks him a few hypothetical questions, and then proceeds to offer him $100,000 if he can find a specific passenger before the end of the line.
At first, McCauley is hesitant and thinks this is a joke. She tells him that the first $25,000 is in the vent in one of the bathrooms on the train. He decides to go and check and finds out that she wasn’t lying.
He is desperate for money because his son is going away for college and since he lost his job, he takes the money. What he didn’t realize is that he is being watched and since he took the money, he has to follow through with the job of finding the suspect.
So begins the race against time in the famous McCauley plot we all know and love. He is given a GPS tracker to put on the suspect once he/she is found. All he knows about the suspect is that they go by the name of Prin and that they are carrying a bag with an item inside.
Not wanting to comply with Joanna’s instructions, McCauley tries to discreetly get help from the police which results in a fatal tragedy. Now that he realizes that these people are serious, McCauley begins to narrow down the passengers by identifying those who do not ride the train every day.
He also looks at the ticket stubs and finds out each passenger’s destination since the suspect would be riding until the last stop. Under pressure, he gets into an altercation with an unusual passenger and implants the tracker on them. However, this is not who they are looking for.
McCauley ends up getting some of the train employees involved in the hunt, which backfires and puts him in a suspecting position. In the end, McCauley ends up being the hero and his family remains unharmed.
Overall, The Commuter is a good film that keeps the audience guessing, but it isn’t anything we haven’t seen before from Neeson.