I'm Sick And Tired Of These Conspiracy-Fighting Commuters On This Monday To Friday Train

Year: 2018

Director: Jaume Collet-Serra

Cast: Liam Neeson, Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson 

Run Time: 1 hour 45 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Jaume Collet-Serra is best known - by those who are aware of him at all - for his inescapable work with Liam Neeson over the past decade (Non-Stop, Run All Night, Unknown), and yet I've seen basically every item in his filmography save for those. And from the angle I'm using, I enjoy him very much. House of Wax was a gleefully gory, surprisingly solid mid-2000's remake, Orphan was a fizzy and delightful B-picture, and The Shallows was a perfect summer movie that proves the killer shark genre still has some juice left in it. So I was excited to explore his newest film, now that I've really had the chance to get down and dirty with him.

Let's just say I'll gladly sign up for his next horror effort, but I'll need a LOT of convincing before I approach another one of these action projects.

In The Commuter, Michael MacCauley (Liam Neeson) is an Irish ex-pat who keeps a crummy job at an insurance agency to support his wife Karen (Elizabeth McGovern) and son Danny (Dean-Charles Chapman), who figure into the story exactly as little as you might expect. One day, after getting fired from his job, a mysterious woman (Vera Farmiga) approaches him on the train, offering him $100,000 if he can find the person on the train who does not belong, who is currently going under the alias Prynne. He isn't told what will happen to this person once he finds them, but one can assume they're not receiving a giant novelty check.

Wondering how ol' Neeson's gonna punchify his way through this one? Well, you see, it turns out the man is an ex-cop, so he relies on his skills, his ex-partner Alex Murphy (Patrick Wilson), and his relationship with the local chief (Sam Neill) to find Prynne, evade capture by the increasingly suspicious train authorities, and fight his way through various goon-shaped obstacles as it turns out Vera is just one head of a massive hydra conspiracy that has eyes and ears everywhere. But once he finds his quarry, he will be faced with this moral quandary: should he save this person from harm or save his family, who at some point during this whole shebang have their lives vaguely threatened.

Look, this whole movie is basically just Liam Neeson Mad Libs; they pretty much expect you to be able to fill in the blanks as needed.

"I'm 60 years of age!" shouts Liam Neeson in an early scene, helpfully underscoring just how useless the script is going to be the entire time. It's almost quaint, the way the dialogue just plain fails to sound like anything a human being has said since the beginning of time. I'd perhaps even call it Agatha Christie-esque, if I was feeling at all charitable, which I am certainly not. 

Because Liam Neeson needs as much information as possible to further the twists and turns of the mystery of who Prynne is, each and every suspect immediately spouts a wealth of detail and insight into their motivations when even slightly prodded. Even if they have up to this point found Neeson to be a frightening and erratic presence that they want to avoid at all costs, they spill the beans on their darkest secrets like they're characters in a Nancy Drew video game and he handed them the right item to unlock their clues. 

Nobody here is an actual dimensional character, least of all this "conspiracy" that fuels the entire conflict. At no point do we get a sense of who they are or what they want, except in the sense that conspiracies are Bad. This vast city-wide crime ring is also completely forgotten by the time the plot tangles itself into such a tight knot the movie is forced to end so it doesn't strangle itself. But I shouldn't bother myself too hard about it, because they don't seem particularly competent anyway. The vague threats to his family that I mentioned earlier are exactly that: his family is mentioned in a phone call but never actually directly threatened. I guess Vera hoped the power of implication would override the fact that they have absolutely zero leverage over this guy, who literally never even remotely considers the possibility that he should stop being a hero to save his loved ones.

I mean, he's had his fair share of action movie families, so I guess it's easy to forget why you care about this particular one.

Jaume Collet-Serra as a visual artist does bring a little more pep and zazz to the proceedings than your average workaday Joe Blow, especially in an opening montage that zips through a week of commuting, showcasing the monotonous, yet subtly different patterns that a weekday warrior can fall into. But no matter how many times he Murder on the Orient Expresses his train by zooming through the entire length, or moves the frame through a tiny hole in a punched ticket, there's no avoiding the fact that this is a pretty run-of-the-mill experience through and through.

The Commuter never shakes that sense of fatigue, especially when it's running through the too-long list of options for Prynne. The characters aren't memorable enough to capture the attention (save for the obligatory asshole banker character who must appear in all movies starring a random scattering of people from all walks of life, who provides Liam Neeson the opportunity to make the most clunky defense of the American middle class that the world of cinema has ever seen), and there's just so many to get through that it just feels endless. 

And when the third act finally kicks in, it makes such a bizarre hash out of police operating procedure and character motivations that it's almost like you slipped into an entirely different, substantially worse movie that goes on for even longer. At least the opening hour had a kind of manic energy thanks to Liam Neeson's natural gravitas, but that all drains directly into the dirt long before the credits roll.

The Commuter is a better January action choice than Proud Mary ever was, as you can potentially have a reasonably amount of fun by turning your brain off and taking the ride. But it would probably be more fun to just take an actual train trip somewhere. It would certainly be more stimulating.

TL;DR: The Commuter weaves a tangled web of plot that even Liam Neeson can't escape from.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1096

Live Every Week Like It's Shark Week

Year: 2016

Director: Jaume Collet-Serra

Cast: Blake Lively, Óscar Jaenada, Brett Cullen

Run Time: 1 hour 26 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

It’s Shark Week, everybody! That time of year where we listen to the Discovery Channel’s lurid aquatic campfire tales and watch endless ad spots for Sharknado 4: The 4th Awakens (yes, that’s the actual title). But for those whose attention spans are longer, this week we turn to the silver screen for The Shallows, the last genuinely buzzed-about shark movie since… what? Open Water? I’m fairly certain nobody saw Shark Night 3D because not even I bought a ticket, and you know how much I’d love to see Katharine McPhee get devoured by a big ol’ Great White. But I digress. Let’s take a chunk out of that plot.

One blogger goes into the water…

In The Shallows, Nancy (Blake Lively) is an American surfer visiting Mexico after her mom passed away. She dropped out of med school (if I had a dollar for every horror movie character who was in med school, I wouldn’t have to watch this movie before noon to get the $6 discount tickets) and decided to travel to the secret beach her mom surfed at when she found out she was pregnant. While surfing some gnarly swells, a Great White Shark attracted by a dying whale attacks her, taking a chunk out of her leg and leaving her stranded on a rock 200 yards from the shore. Can she rely on her wits, her med school skills, and her nerves to help her survive?

And exactly what skills does her cleavage have to offer?

The obvious comparison here is Jaws, but for me The Shallows is more akin to Gravity. One woman must utilize everything she has to overcome a grave challenge, facing the mounting obstacles with wit and determination in the face of life-altering grief. Only instead of a mother losing her daughter, it’s the other way around. Unlike Gravity, The Shallows was not helmed by visionary director Alfonso Cuarón using technology so bleeding-edge the film had to delay shooting until it was invented. However, it was directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, whose 2005 effort House of Wax was an abomination, but a beautiful, stomach-churning one.

Collet-Serra’s filmography has been a steady drip of B-horror and Liam Neeson growlers, but he has more flair than that pedigree would imply, and he brings it in spades to The Shallows. I suppose it’s not difficult to make the Gold Coast of Australia look beautiful (the Aussie beach was subbed in for Mexico – that’s the real secret), but his early scenes of surfer porn are serenely gorgeous and sublimely chilling, alternating between expansive, gasp-inducing wide shots that dazzle the senses and plunging the camera underwater where the crashing waves give way to foreboding stillness. It’s all silent as the grave, lurking, making sure everybody knows exactly what this poor American tourist is in for

Speaking of beautiful things, The Shallows has what is so far the best integration of modern technology I’ve seen in a feature film. Although a line about Uber is dropped like a sack of potatoes and Nancy gets surreally terrific WiFi at this uninhabited beach, her phone screen is blended perfectly into the frame, appearing almost like a fuzzy, cloudy thought bubble next to her head rather than plonking down the cut-and-paste rectangle that has become S.O.P. for modern films. 

And when she uses FaceTime, the two video screens bounce around the frame, filling negative space and drawing closer together or further apart as dictated by the emotion of the scene. It’s a very clever, organic way to bring in modern tech without stopping the movie in its tracks, and I think it has finally toppled Chef’s three-dimensional Tweets from the throne of best cinematic smartphone depiction. Which is awesome, because I kind of hated that movie.

OK, that’s all well and good, but isn’t there a f**king SHARK in the Shallows?

You’re right, sassy caption. This is a shark movie, however much I’m obsessed with floating squares. Obviously, like in most survival movies, the shark is pretty much incidental. We’re here to see how Blake Lively deals with the situation the shark has trapped her in.

Because even in 2016, every shark movie is living under the shadow of Jaws, the Great White is mainly offscreen or in silhouette until well past the midpoint. The shift between the implied shark and the FX shark is pretty arbitrary and has next to no impact on the plot or tone because Collet-Serra is no Spielberg, but the action we get beyond this point is thoroughly entertaining.

The shark, which I presume to be mostly CGI (certain shots go far beyond presumption, but they’re hardly film breaking), is a credible, weighty threat, and its gnashing, thrashing antics provide an adrenaline spike to this tale of survival. But the effects I really want to talk about are all gore. The Shallows gets away with a surprising amount for a PG-13 film., and Lively’s collected gashes and bruises are a gruesome throwback to the days of Saw-adjacent “bad vacation” films like The Ruins, The Descent, or even House of Wax. It’s kind of refreshing to see a film that isn’t one of the safe, bloodless, haunting pics that are the only things to make it into theaters these days. Subtly realistic and powerfully disgusting, the gore is both a treat for horrorhounds and an important element in the overall story.

So. Sharks are awesome. Bloody gashes are awesome. But the surprising strength of The Shallows is Gossip Girl Blake Lively. Not having had much experience with her, I wasn’t certain she could carry what is more or less a solo film on her back, but she sails through this movie with aplomb. A performance is not great because a sexy actress is willing to look bedraggled with chapped Fury Road lips and bags under her eyes, though I do always admire Hollywoodites willing to go for it. But that’s just one fact of her work here, which isn’t life-changing but is at least magnetic and compelling. I never for one second doubted her bleak plight. Plus, she manages to sell the whole “talking to herself so we get dialogue” bit, even when the script gets a little loopy and obvious.

And this is far from a slight on her, but she’s bolstered by a breakthrough performance from an unexpected co-star: Steven the Seagull. She’s trapped on a rock with the injured bird, which acts both as a dialogue receptacle and a moral sounding bard. 

Nancy’s decision whether or not to snap the bird’s neck and devour it part and parcel is perhaps the most tense moment of the film because the seagull is giving a startlingly charismatic turn. Many, many, many people would cite this scene as evidence that this movie really shows its PG-13 hand, but for once I was so invested in the animal itself that I didn’t mind the toothless delivery. Now that's a performance. The forlorn and sympathetic bird is just doing its own thing and trying to survive, but it quickly becomes a companion, a beacon of hope, and GOD DAMN WHY IS THIS BIRD SUCH A GOOD ACTOR?!

Maybe he attended Seagulliard.

All in all, The Shallows is a pleasant surprise. It could have easily been as shallow as its title (a surfing montage and a featured Sia song certainly feint in that direction), but it’ really a thrilling, beautifully shot, simple, yet lasting survival piece. The emotional resonance is quick and dirty, but the thrills are non-stop summer gold. This is a rare shark film in that I’ not embarrassed putting it in the conversation with Jaws, although it’s obviously far slighter. But it capture that summer movie magic of being afraid to go into the water, and I kind of adore it for that.

TL;DR: The Shallows is a fun, lively (pun absolutely intended) shark attack movie.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1331