Zach Vasquez Says Don’t Forget: The Commuter

The Commuter, Jaume Collet-Serra’s fourth collaboration with Liam Neeson, is a two-fisted Hitchcock riff with enough personality, humor, and righteous anger to stand out from the current crop of old-man action movies. While it may retread much of the same ground as the duo’s earlier Non-Stop (2014), it also refines the formula: the characters are more memorable, the pacing is tighter, the twists are more surprising (I doubt anyone was expecting a Spartacus homage), and the action is more enrapturing. A top-shelf formalist, Collet-Serra is able to make the opening montage about a working schlub’s monotonous daily routine as exciting as his later fistfight with a guitar-wielding assassin. Collet-Serra is set to make the jump to franchise blockbusters next year — he’s helming Disney’s Jungle Cruise — but let’s hope the transition isn’t a permanent or irreversible one. We need these earnest, original, modern-day B-pictures. And, if nothing else, we deserve a boat-set film from him and Neeson to round out their land, air, and sea trilogy.