Hayao Miyazaki Swoops In Out of Retirement to Deliver ‘The Boy and the Heron’

December 5, 2023

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Boy? Or Heron? (CREDIT: GKIDS)

Starring: Japanese Cast: Soma Santoki, Masaki Suda, Aimyon, Yoshina Kimura, Takuya Kimura, Shōhei Hino, Ko Shibasaki, Kaoru Kobayashi, Jun Kunimura
English Dubbed Cast: Luca Padovan, Robert Pattinson, Karen Fukuhara, Gemma Chan, Christian Bale, Mark Hamill, Florence Pugh, Willem Dafoe, Dave Bautista

Director: Hayao Miyazaki

Running Time: 124 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for Lethal Flames and Freaky-Looking Talking Animals

Release Date: December 8, 2023 (Theaters)

What’s It About?: During the middle of World War II, 12-year-old Mahito’s mother Hisako dies in a hospital fire. One year later, his widowed father Shoichi remarries Hisako’s younger sister, Natsuko, and they all move from Tokyo to the countryside. Everyone at the estate is eager to lavish attention on Mahito, including the gaggle of maids, as well as a strange, persistent grey heron. Soon enough, that bird leads Mahiko into an alternate world where parakeets are the size of humans and Mahito’s missing granduncle is a wizard keeping existence in perfect balance. As the boy and the heron make their way through this parallel plane, the entire fate of his family might just rest upon the success of their journey.

What Made an Impression?: A Thin Line Between Reality and Fantasy: If you had no idea before reading this review that The Boy and the Heron was written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, chances are you would’ve figured it out immediately upon reading that synopsis. In his decades-long career of helming animated classics like Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and Ponyo, Miyazsaki has tapped into eternal childlike wonder by having fantastical realms spring up within the confines of real world settings. Mahito’s trip into the alternate reality is so gradual that it almost feels like this sort of thing could happen to anybody who’s watching. It certainly helps that his situation always remains tethered to his starting point. That’s the sort of magic that Miyazaki is famous for, and it’s just as potent as it’s always been.
Seeking Harmony: Mahito’s world is in flux in pretty much every imaginable way on both grand and intimate scales. He’s been displaced by war, he’s lost a parent, and now animals are talking to him! No wonder the ultimate message of The Boy and the Heron is about putting everything back in balance. Mahito’s granduncle faces a mighty foe in this struggle in the form of the king of the parakeets, which feels a bit like avian slander, but in the context of the story, it works appropriately enough. Anyway, by the end of the movie, it’s kind of questionable whether or not full balance has actually been maintained. But perhaps that’s because the story is not really over. Mahito will be an adult soon enough, and this is exactly the sort of formative experience he could use to make sure that he grows up to be a valuable citizen of the world.
Subs vs. Dubs: And finally, I’ll offer a note about whether you should seek out the subtitled or dubbed version of The Boy and the Heron. I saw the former, which I generally prefer when it comes to foreign-language films, because I like to hear the native tongue, and I usually have the captions on anyway even when I’m watching something in English. But in this case I was a little disappointed that I didn’t get to see the dubbed version, because the English voice cast looks so promising. I’ll probably have to check it out eventually just so that I can hear Dave Bautista as the Parakeet King. If you have a choice between one or the other, I think you’ll be fine either way. And if you have the time and the inclination, then go ahead and give both versions a whirl!

The Boy and the Heron is Recommended If You Like: Miyazaki in general, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Aflac Duck

Grade: 4 out of 5 Parakeets

I Am Become Viewer of ‘Oppenheimer,’ Did It Destroy My World?

July 19, 2023

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Has he become Death yet? (CREDIT: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures)

Starring: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, Benny Safdie, Dylan Arnold, Gustaf Skarsgård, David Krumholtz, Matthew Modine, David Dastmalchian, Tom Conti, Michael Angarano, Jack Quaid, Josh Peck, Olivia Thirlby, Dane DeHaan, Danny Deferrari, Alden Ehrenreich, Jefferson Hall, Jason Clarke, James D’Arcy, Tony Goldwyn, Devon Bostwick, Alex Wolff, Scott Grimes, Josh Zuckerman, Matthias Schweighöfer, Christopher Denham, David Rysdahl, Guy Burnet, Louis Lombard, Harrison Gilbertson, Emma Dumont, Trond Fausa Aurvåg, Olli Haaskivi, Gary Oldman, John Gowans, Kurt Koehler, Macon Blair, Harry Groener, Jack Cutmore-Scott, James Remar, Gregory Jbara, Tim DeKay, James Urbaniak

Director: Christopher Nolan

Running Time: 180 Minutes

Rating: R for Some Disturbing Images and Deviously Edited Sex Scenes

Release Date: July 21, 2023 (Theaters)

What’s It About?: J. Robert Oppenheimer didn’t build the atomic bomb all by himself, but he’s borne the weight of its legacy much more than anybody else. In adapting the biography American Prometheus, Christopher Nolan makes it clear just how sprawling the efforts of the Manhattan Project were in the halls of science, government, and the military, while also underlining how it all revolved around Oppenheimer. This is a three-hour epic with one of the most sprawling casts in recent cinematic history. Despite that deep bench, Cillian Murphy is in nearly every single scene as the father of the atomic bomb. It’s an intimate approach that paradoxically illuminates the massiveness of the moment. As Oppenheimer traces the title character’s journey from homesick PhD student to Los Alamos to Princeton, it makes the case about how much the world irreversibly changed through his efforts.

What Made an Impression?: Again with the Time Manipulation: Christopher Nolan is famous for manipulating temporal perception in his films, and Oppenheimer serves as an ideal subject for that approach. As inheritors of the legacy of relativity from Albert Einstein (memorably played by Tom Conti), paradoxes about the nature of the universe were pretty much a given for Oppenheimer and his colleagues. Nolan is basically the filmmaking equivalent of a relative physicist, with a storytelling approach that is technically out of order but makes perfect sense when you look at it from the right angle. The story of Oppenheimer plays out in a linear fashion in the broad strokes, but there are some key scenes that are teased and revisited with varying degrees of essential information. The past, present, and the future converged at the Manhattan Project, and Oppenheimer apparently saw that more clearly than anybody. This is all to say, if your mind works like both Nolan’s and Oppenheimer’s, then this movie will make perfect sense to you.
Messy Mythmaking: Oppenheimer didn’t just seek to understand the world through particles and waves, but also through storytelling. He famously uttered a quote from the Bhagavad Gita (“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”), and his accomplishments have often been compared to that of Prometheus, the Greek god who stole fire from Olympus and then gave it to humans, thereby granting them the power to destroy themselves. Mythmaking of individuals is often used to mean valorization that elides more complicated truths. But the myths of ancient cultures that have survived to this day are filled with the foibles of mortals and deities. Oppenheimer makes it clear that this modern Prometheus had plenty of shortcomings as well, particularly unfaithfulness and stubbornness. (Although, I must say that his reputation for an disagreeable personality is a little overblown; sure, he always speaks his mind, but he’s generally pleasant to be around.) With its mix of historical accuracy and cinematic embellishment, Oppenheimer earns its place in the mythical tradition.
We Needed Some Bonhomie: Despite the doomsday cloud hanging over the whole proceedings, Oppenheimer also works quite well as a hangout movie. J. Robert was friends or acquaintances with seemingly every other prominent scientist of the mid-20th century, and it’s a delight just seeing them interacting and mentally stimulating each other. That levity is especially welcome with a three-hour running time, which is always a tall order, even for especially receptive moviegoers. We all have bladders, after all! So while I quite enjoyed Oppenheimer, I’m not eager to immediately watch the entire thing all over again, though I would happily check out a supercut of every scene with Albert Einstein as a jolly old wizardly mentor.

Oppenheimer is Recommended If You Like: The History Channel, Scientific American, Interstellar

Grade: 4 out of 5 Destroyers of Worlds

‘Puss in Boots: The Last Wish’ Shoots for the Stars!

December 19, 2022

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When You Wish Upon a Puss in Boots… (CREDIT: Dreamworks Animation)

Starring: Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek, Harvey Guillén, John Mulaney, Florence Pugh, Olivia Colman, Ray Winstone, Samson Kayo, Wagner Moura, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Anthony Mendez, Kevin McCann, Betsy Sodaro

Director: Joel Crawford

Running Time: 102 Minutes

Rating: PG for Cartoon Kitty Catastrophes

Release Date: December 21, 2022 (Theaters)

What’s It About?: A talking cat? A talking, swashbuckling cat?! Well, yes indeed. We’ve known this debonair furball for years at this point. Decades even. He lives in a fairy tale world where plenty of the animals are anthropomorphized, after all. Puss in Boots (Antonio Banderas) has had no trouble making a name for himself. But alas, he seems to be losing a bit of his mojo lately. And when you’re a feline, that means having only one of your reputed nine lives left to spare. But this being a fairy tale world and all, there exist methods for magical restoration. So when Puss hears about the existence of a Wishing Star, he naturally wants to get his claws on it. But he’s not the only one, as Jack Horner (John Mulaney), Goldilocks (Florence Pugh) and the three bears (Olivia Colman, Ray Winstone, Samson Kayo), and Puss’ old flame Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek) all have their own plans to procure the star’s powers. Also, Harvey Guillén voices a dog.

What Made an Impression?: If the only Shrek film you’ve seen previously was the first one, you could be forgiven for not realizing that Puss in Boots: The Last Wish takes place in the same universe. Sure, both of them are populated by fairy tale characters, but their modus operandi are totally different. Where the green ogre was irreverent, his feline colleague is more purely adventurous. The likes of Jack Horner, Goldi, and Pinocchio are thein window dressing in a sense, with their cultural histories mostly beside the point. The Last Wish‘s spacey climax on the Wishing Star feels like something out of an LSD trip, or a Super Mario video game, which is to say: not at all what I was expecting.

In that vein, The Last Wish actually reminded me of Halloween Ends, insofar as they’re both latter-day franchise entries with confoundingly unpredictable narrative left turns. In both cases, it’s plenty fascinating, and I suspect it will be easier to get away with this time around, since Puss doesn’t have to bear the weight of expectations that Michael Myers does. If his creators want to make his latest adventure more fantastical than any corner of the Shrek universe has ever been, then there’s really no reason not to. It certainly gives the voice cast something new to bite into, to the point that John Mulaney appears to be experiencing Heath Ledger-as-Joker-level glee in his revolution of a classic character. There’s room to color outside the lines here, and I can’t complain about that.

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is Recommended If You Like: Super Smash Bros., Mario Kart, John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch

Grade: 3 out of 5 Swords

Interestingly Enough, I Saw ‘Don’t Worry Darling’

October 5, 2022

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How WORRIED are they?! (CREDIT: Warner Bros. Pictures/Screenshot)

Starring: Florence Pugh, Harry Styles, Chris Pine, Olivia Wilde, Gemma Chan, Kiki Layne, Nick Kroll, Kate Berland, Timothy Simons, Douglas Smith, Sydney Chandler, Asif Ali, Ari’el Satchel

Director: Olivia Wilde

Running Time: 123 Minutes

Rating: R

Release Date: September 23, 2022 (Theaters)

The behind-the-scenes drama of Don’t Worry Darling has been so messy. And on screen, it’s not much cleaner. The seams are clear right away in this mid-century-style suburban fantasy world! But that messiness makes sense to me. The backwards-tomorrow that these men are trying to create would be pretty difficult to perfect. There were many scenes that had me going “Does this undercut the central metaphor?” And they did, but pointedly so. The pandemonium is a feature, not a bug.

Grade: I Wasn’t Worried, I Was Excited!

21st Century ‘Black Widow’ Movie Review

July 11, 2021

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Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Florence Pugh, David Harbour, Rachel Weisz, O-T Fagbenle, Olga Kurylenko, Ray Winstone, William Hurt

Director: Cate Shortland

Running Time: 134 Minutes

Rating: PG-13

Release Date: July 9, 2021 (Theaters and Disney+ Premier Access)

“Plug it in, plug it in.” That’s the classic slogan of the famed Glade air freshener line of products. I currently find myself revisiting it in light of having recently watched the Marvel Cinematic Universe superhero film Black Widow, as my primary reaction to that movie was, “Well, that character has now been plugged into the MCU.”

Florence Pugh as Yelena Belova? She’s been plugged in. David Harbour as the Red Guardian? He’s certainly been plugged in. And Rachel Weisz as Melina Vestokof? Yet another character that’s been plugged in! Yes indeed, they plugged ’em all in.

Grade: 4 or 5 Tasks out of 1 Taskmaster

Best Film Performances of the 2010s

June 22, 2020

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CREDIT: YouTube Screenshots

Back in April, I revealed my lists of the best podcasts, TV shows, TV episodes, albums, songs, and movies of the 2010s. I declared that that was it for my Best of the Decade curating for this particular ten-year cycle. But now I’m back with a few more, baby! I’ve been participating in a series of Best of the 2010s polls with some of my online friends, and I wanted to share my selections with you. We’re including film performances, TV performances, directors, and musical artists, so get ready for all that.

First up is Film Performances. Any individual performance from any movie released between January 1, 2010 and December 31, 2019 was eligible, whether it was live-action, voice-only, or whatever other forms on-screen acting take nowadays. For actors who played the same character in multiple movies, each movie was considered separately.

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Greta Gerwig’s ‘Little Women’ Demonstrates the Power of Renewed Resonance Through Reorganizing

December 17, 2019

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CREDIT: Wilson Webb/Columbia/Sony Pictures

Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Eliza Scanlen, Laura Dern, Timothée Chalamet, Meryl Streep, Tracy Letts, Bob Odenkirk, James Norton, Louis Garrel, Chris Cooper

Director: Greta Gerwig

Running Time: 135 Minutes

Rating: PG for A Few Bloody Knuckles and General Adolescence

Release Date: December 25, 2019

I’m a big advocate for the value of consuming a story in whatever order you damn well please. If you get engrossed in a movie halfway through and then watch the beginning at some future point, then bully on you. If you watch the last season of a popular TV show first and then catch up on previous seasons in a random zigzagging order, that sounds fascinating. If you always skip ahead to the last paragraph of a novel and also reread your favorite chapters before you’re done the whole thing, then it sounds like you’re someone who enjoys experimenting. To all of you who fit in any of those categories, you’ve got a kindred spirit in Greta Gerwig, who plays mix-and-match with her rendition of Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 semi-autobiographical novel Little Women, one of the most beloved and oft-adapted works of American fiction.

If I were to extend my advocacy for watching something in whatever order you like to its logical end, then I could say that you could watch this Little Women in an even more chronologically mixed-up fashion than it already is. (Or you could go in the opposite direction, and I bet there is someone out there who will one day re-edit this film into a more temporally linear fashion.) But Gerwig’s chosen order of events is far from arbitrary. The opening scene and one of the final moments especially underscore the themes that she wants to bring to the surface.

There is a general air of light postmodernism to this movie, in the sense that there is a tacit understanding that the majority of the audience is already familiar with the story. Thus, Gerwig begins with scenes in which the little women are closer to, if not already, grown adults. The most iconic episodes from earlier in the March sisters’ lives do not need to be rehashed, at least not right away. Instead, Jo March (Saoirse Ronan) kicks things off by bounding into a publishing office to sell a story she’s written. It’s bought by a Mr. Dashwood (Tracy Letts), but he also tells her that if her main character is a girl, she must be married (or dead) by the end. Chances are that most viewers know that these are indeed the fates that await the March sisters, but a collective smirk is likely to form across the crowd at this moment, because we also know that the entire purpose of Little Women is that these significant lives are not just reduced to their expected conclusions.

The other essential moment comes when the far-flung temporal settings have caught up with each other, and Jo is fretting to her sisters that her completed novel, based on her own family life, is about a trivial topic and nothing important. Even though she is mightily invested in her own work, she is still subscribing to the idea that only “important” subjects are really worthy of being written about in novels. But then her youngest, always fiercely opinionated sister Amy (Florence Pugh) insists that the mere act of writing about a subject confers importance upon it. And so, because Gerwig is telling this story once again, and because it is clearly a labor of love for her, and because Emma Watson and Eliza Scanlen are there alongside her and Ronan and Pugh to round out and bring to life the March sisterhood, all of that is the reason why Little Women is important in 2019.

Little Women is Recommended If You Like: Revisiting the classics

Grade: 4 out of 5 Adaptations

Movie Review: Agony and Catharsis Fight for Prominence in the Emotional Turbulence of ‘Midsommar’: Which Makes It Out on Top?

July 1, 2019

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CREDIT: A24

Starring: Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor, William Jackson Harper, Will Poulter, Vilhelm Blomgren

Director: Ari Aster

Running Time: 140 Minutes

Rating: R for Graphic Pagan Rituals

Release Date: July 3, 2019

Plenty of horror movies have served as metaphors for emotionally turbulent life events (Don’t Look Now, The Babadook, and director Ari Aster’s own Hereditary, to name a few), but never before have I been so relieved by that fact than in the case of Midsommar. Because if it weren’t a metaphor, its ending would be way too distressing to bear. The conclusion is about as terrifying as one could imagine given the premise, but it’s leavened with a sense of relief, as a breakup that really needed to happen has finally happened. If that sounds like a spoiler, rest assured that I’m just stating the inevitable.

Midsommar opens with Dani (rising supernova Florence Pugh) and Christian (Jack Reynor, aka Seth Rogen’s long-lost Irish cousin) looking like they are both about to realize their need to split up, but then Dani experiences a sudden family trauma, and dumping her is fully out of the question at this point as she really needs someone to lean on. If nothing else, Midsommar is about the importance of having a reliable network of emotional support, and the danger of how that need can be manipulated. That fact is unavoidable when Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren) takes Dani and Christian and their other friends Josh (William Jackson Harper) and Mark (Will Poulter) to the Swedish commune he grew up in. It’s summer in Scandinavia, which means that the sun seemingly never sets, thus providing the perfect setting to confirm, or perhaps exceed, our worst suspicions of what a “commune” in a horror movie really means.

Ultimately, I am not quite sublimely thrilled by Midsommar; not quite underwhelmed, but perhaps just whelmed. It delivered what I expected, based on the trailer and Florence Pugh’s unrestrained agony on the poster. In that vein, it reminds me quite a bit of Get Out, which was similarly groundbreaking in its concept but rather straightforward in its accomplishment once I got onboard with its premise. But Get Out has proved ripe for revisiting and benefited accordingly, and I imagine that the same might be true in the long run for Midsommar once it is less weighed down by expectations. It certainly has the indelible imagery to make repeat visits worthwhile.

Midsommar is Recommended If You Like: The Wicker Man, Hereditary, Emotional Turmoil Raising the Stakes of Horror

Grade: 3.5 out of 5 Unexplained Bears

Movie Review: ‘Fighting with My Family’ Shows Us the Heart and Triumph Over Adversity in a Life Devoted to Wrestling

February 13, 2019

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CREDIT: Robert Viglasky/Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures

Starring: Florence Pugh, Jack Lowden, Nick Frost, Lena Headey, Vince Vaughn, Dwayne Johnson

Director: Stephen Merchant

Running Time: 108 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for The Bodily Sacrifices of Wrestling, Crude Comments, and Drunken Misbehavior

Release Date: February 14, 2019 (Limited)/Expands Nationwide February 22, 2019

Most inspirational sports flicks follow the same rise-fall-rise structure, down to every little setback and triumph. But it makes sense that audiences have never fully tired of this genre, because while it may be repetitive, it is rarely unrealistic. Athletics is one field of human endeavor in which you can explicitly say whether or not you have emerged the winner. And just about every champion, or at least the ones worth watching, has at some point felt like an underdog. The professional wrestling biopic Fighting with My Family does nothing to mess with that formula. But while wrestling may be staged, there is still plenty uncertain along the way, and there is similarly enough uniquely compelling and surprising about Fighting with My Family to make its allegiance to formula plenty forgivable.

Florence Pugh stars as Saraya “Paige” Bevis, who at the age of 21 in 2014 became the youngest winner ever of WWE’s Divas Championship. (As far as I could tell from the movie and looking up footage of Paige’s actual fight, this is one WWE tournament in which the winner is not predetermined.) Paige comes from a wrestling-obsessed family in working-class England, and she and her brother Zak (Jack Lowden) have dreamt their whole lives of rising to the ranks of WWE together, but alas, only Paige is given the opportunity.

You don’t have to be a wrestling fan to know that there will be a happy ending. You just have to watch the commercials and have enough common sense to know that if Paige didn’t become a champion, there probably wouldn’t be a movie about her. But considering that it ends on a note of such undisputed victory, there is a lot of bleakness along the way. Figuring herself a weirdo outcast, Paige struggles to get along with the more traditional hard bodies among her fellow recruits, and the isolation she experiences in sleekly empty, oppressively artificially lit hotel rooms is palpable. Even more intense are Zak’s demons. He put all his chips in the WWE basket, and as he feels that dream slipping away, he quickly transforms from a chipper young buck devotedly in love with his girlfriend and happy to be a new father into the most resentful person in the world. When Paige ultimately triumphs, it is as inspiring as it ought to be, but because of those descents into darkness, Fighting with My Family‘s most heartening moments are the times when the Bevis family make it clear that they have each other’s backs, and that is why this entry lifts itself atop the genre.

Fighting with My Family is Recommended If You Like: Professional wrestling and the stories behind it, Rocky, Warrior, Wacky working-class families

Grade: 4 out of 5 Title Belts

This Is a Movie Review: The Fundamentally Implausible ‘The Commuter’ Speeds Towards the Upper Tier of Entertainingly Ridiculous Action Thrillers

January 11, 2018

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CREDIT: Jay Maidment/Lionsgate

This post was originally published on News Cult in January 2018.

Starring: Liam Neeson, Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Jonathan Banks, Elizabeth McGovern, Sam Neill, Florence Pugh, Clara Lago, Ella-Rae Smith, Andy Nyman, Rolland Møller, Colin McFarlane, Adam Nagaitis

Director: Jaume Collet-Serra

Running Time: 105 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for All the Ways That Liam Neeson Can Improvise on a Train to Dispatch His Opponents

Release Date: January 12, 2018

Much of Liam Neeson’s post-Taken filmography has been readily reduced to “Taken on a [blank]” or “Taken, but this time they steal his [blank].” This is especially true in his collaborations with director Jaume Collet-Serra. 2011’s Unknown checked in as “Taken, but this time they steal his identity,” while 2014’s Non-Stop was essentially “Taken on a plane.” Their latest teamup, The Commuter, may at first glance be their “Taken on a train,” but a more accurate pitch would be: “take the government and law enforcement corruption elements of something like Chinatown, compress them into the hijacked train scene of The French Connection, and stretch out to feature length.”

Insurance salesman and former cop Michael McCauley (Neeson) has just been laid off, only a few years before retirement, when a mysterious woman (Vera Farmiga) offers him a proposition during his ride home along the Hudson on the Metro-North train: would he be willing to do one little thing that would affect someone he doesn’t know and receive a significant reward in return? This is presented as a hypothetical, but it soon becomes very real when he discovers a hidden bag filled with tens of thousands of dollars in cash. This is an effectively simple premise insofar as it immediately kicks the narrative into high gear, but it is simultaneously confounding with how many details it leaves under wraps.

Ultimately, that is to the audience’s benefit, as we are strung along with just enough info to want to sniff out what is going on. All Michael has to go on is the stop that this person is getting off and the fact that he or she does not normally ride this train. Collet-Serra specializes in populating his cast with a full crew of conceivably suspicious characters. Could it be that this mystery person is the tattooed girl with a bag full of fake IDs? That certainly raises alarms. But for all we and Michael know, the nurse stuck in an emotional texting session is just as much of a suspect.

The Commuter sort of fits in the vein of the “decent man fights back against a rigged system” genre, but really, that is only the narrative that has been forced upon Michael. Yes, he has been unfairly fired. True, he did lose all his savings thanks to the recent market crash (and he makes sure to flip off the vain Goldman Sachs broker on the train). But the reward dangled in front of him appeals to his selfish motives and does not actually give him an opportunity to stick up for the little guy. Besides, he is driven more by the threats against his wife and son and his own law enforcement instincts for uncovering the truth. It is implied that this criminal enterprise is so insidious and far-reaching that they could set up any patsies they want and frame them for any motivation

As the vast conspiracy begins to be revealed, we are left to confront the question of plausibility. But in a thriller like this, verisimilitude matters less than following the own theoretical rules of this extreme situation. That is to say, The Commuter needs to be at least as relentlessly entertaining as it is ridiculous. And on that score, given the director, star, and location, it is unsurprisingly adroit. The film’s logical internal consistency, though, may be worth investigating a little more deeply, as the passengers at the mercy of Michael’s mission may come to trust him –  a man who has been getting into fights and throwing people out windows – more quickly than is conceivable. A late-stage Spartacus homage is quite amusing, though indicative of that questionable trust. But in a profoundly puzzling situation with life-or-death stakes like this one, it only makes sense to go along for the ride.

The Commuter is Recommended If You Like: Non-Stop, Face/Off, The French Connection

Grade: 4 out of 5 Train Defenestrations

 

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