Liam Neeson has been bedeviled on an airplane. He's been bedeviled on a train. At this point, Neeson is going to find trouble on every form of public transportation. The Commuter is the fourth collaboration between America's favorite geriatric action star and director Jaume Collet-Serra (Unknown, Non-Stop, Run All Night). None of those movies had the success of Taken but several had some pleasures or an intriguing mystery or hook. The Commuter makes Non-Stop look like Agatha Christie in comparison. Michael MacCauley (Neeson) is an ex-cop-turned life insurance salesman who commutes into New York City every weekday. He recognizes many familiar faces on the train, except for Joanna (Vera Farmiga), an expert on human behavior. She makes a strange offer: find a passenger by the code name of "Prynn" before the last stop and he'll receive $100,000. The passenger, a high-value witness, will be less well off. Michael taps into his old cop instincts to deduce who might be the desired target. As each stop passes, he has less time to figure out the identity and decide whether he'll go through with it all. It's impossible to ignore the fact that the plot is so bizarrely similar to 2014's Non-Stop, with Neeson as a former cop trapped on a mode of travel, being harassed by a mysterious figure, and tasked with discovering the identity of someone on-board before it's too late while he's possibly being set up to take the fall. It's almost as if the producers said, "Hey, let's get the director of Non-Stop, the star of Non-Stop, and why don't we just make Non-Stop but, like, on a train?" And then that man bought a new house in celebration of his genius. I look forward to the next entry in the Neeson-Stuck-on-Transportation Trilogy where he's stalking a ferry approaching Niagara Falls and being blackmailed into finding hidden diamonds. The major problem, besides being so recycled that it could have been retiled Phoning It In: The Movie, is how nothing makes sense at all. With lower-rent genre thrillers, things don't always have to make the best of sense. Even the best thrillers suffer from leaps of logic but are excused because of how engaged we are in the movie. With The Commuter, I was so detached from the movie that I was impatiently waiting to get off on the next stop, no matter what was waiting on the other side. The villainous scheme is predicated on so many people doing so many stupid decisions that are far more complicated than they have any right to be. First, this villainous organization essentially looking for a witness on the train has been tipped off from an inside source in the FBI. Except this source cannot say what that witness looks like. Also, why is the FBI allowing such an important witness travel by his or herself minus protection and among the public? I know for a fact that there's an FBI office in New York City. The FBI members picking the witness up also don't know what this person looks like, which again begets stupidly bad communication. The bad guys are also pretty bad if they have to resort to such efforts to suss out a witness. Can't they find somebody to hack a phone? The bad guys steal Neeson's phone to limit his communication. Yet, as he does in the movie, he simply asks another passenger to use their phone. What was the point of all of that? The villains also immediately inform Neeson that his family has been kidnapped, allowing little room for raising he stakes. Why don't they wait to see who gets off and leaves with the FBI and use a sniper to take them out? Maybe it's not about killing the person but destroying the evidence, so in that case you do random bag checks from a train worker. That's it. Then there's the nickname given to the target ("Prynn"). Who gave birth to this nickname and why would the witness carry the one item in public that would confirm their identity? If that's the case, why did any of the bad guys need Neeson? He seems best served as a patsy considering he acts like a maniac, at one point pointing a gun at people and making demands, before settling back and assuring the passengers he's trustworthy. That's what stable people do, naturally. Why should anyone believe anything this guy says? Here's an example of how dumb this movie is. There are a few characters introduced in the opening act that you know will come back again because of the economy of characters and because name actors don't take do-nothing parts in genre fare (unless you're Chloe Sevigny in The Snowman, apparently). I'm waiting for confirmation that one of these characters is revealed to be working with our nefarious villains. A character has a very specific phrase they share with Neeson. Then, upon figuring out who the sought-after witness is on the train, he or she relates their story about bad cops and how one of them used the exact phrase. Fine, as expected, but then Neeson doesn't respond. It triggers nothing from him even though he had only been with these people hours ago. It's only later when this same phrase is said for the THIRD time does Neeson finally connect the dots. If a magic phrase is going to be the trigger then why have this extra step? It just makes Neeson look dumb and it doesn't speak well to the film's opinion of its audience. Regardless of how nonsensical a thriller comes across, as long as it delivers the suspenseful genre goods, much can be forgiven. This is another area where The Commuter doesn't perform well. There's one decent hand-to-hand fight filmed in a long take that has a solid visceral appeal, but other than that this movie takes turns either looking ugly or like its budget wasn't simply enough. The location calls for very cramped and limited environment that will require some combat ingenuity that the movie just isn't up to the task for. Watching Neeson stalk from car to car, playing his Columbo detective games with resolutely stock characters (Lady Macbeth's breakout star Florence Pugh deserves better), is not as fun as it sounds, and it doesn't sound that fun. Maybe if the rote characters were better drawn, if the evil scheme was a bit cleaner, if the hero was more morally compromised, then maybe the downtime wouldn't be as boring. There's a ridiculous derailing sequence and then there's another twenty minutes after. Collet-Serra can only bring so much to the movie, and the script doesn't have enough clever inventions or reversals to spur much in the director's imagination. As a result, everything feels like a deflated by-the-numbers thriller that would be better appearing on late night TV. Neeson (Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House) is on action autopilot as he settles into the shed skin of one of his past Collet-Serra performances. He's gruff, he's cunning, he'll take your best and keep swinging, and as he reminds the audience at three separate points, he's sixty years old. He can still offer simple pleasures, and if your only requirement for entertainment is watching Neeson punch people and things, then The Commuter will fulfill your needs. His character is supposed to be placed in a moral question of self-interest but there's never any doubt. If Neeson was a corrupt cop, I think that would be a better character arc and starting point for a guy questioning selling out a stranger. I'm surprised at how generally wasted every actor is, notably Farmiga (The Conjuring 2), who is literally only in two scenes on screen (her role is mostly nagging phone calls). She's the only person given a little personality. Perhaps that's because we already know where her allegiances lie so the sloppy screenplay doesn't have to keep her an inscrutable suspect to interrogate. The Commuter is a dumb ride to the generic and expected, and then it just keeps going. If you're really hard up for entertainment and have a love affair with Neeson's fists, I suppose assorted thrills could be found, but for everyone else this is one to miss. Nate's Grade: C-