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B-movie cop films used to be so specific to the counties they came from that you could spot the cultural sore spots from over the horizon, but now they just tell you that digital post-production workflows are the same in any language. The Liquidator put the wind up its domestic Chinese distributors so much that its release was postponed, but on western shelves it will slot in next to the ballistic bits of Vinnie Jones’s catalogue and enjoy a similar destiny. It’s also lumbered with a twist on loan from the kind of high-camp soap operas in which UFOs spirited characters away during contract negotiations, presented here with an unwise poker face. I reviewed the film for the March issue of Sight & Sound magazine.
It pains an acolyte of both Liam Neeson and Jaume Collet-Serra to admit that The Commuter is a bit of a drag, but it too is stuck in a particular type of digital post-production purgatory. The tyranny of identical software packages everywhere has drained the life from films in which everyone gets stuck on public transport, all of them now draped in a bloodless green-screen unreality, the not very convincing carriage interiors matched by the not very convincing exteriors glimpsed through the not very convincing windows. Plus The Commuter is set in the US but arrives direct from Planet Pinewood, an additional unreality through which a number of British faces swim — notably Florence Pugh who doesn’t even get to be Neeson’s quarry. There’s talk of an outside world of unemployment and capitalist collapse, but it’s not even as authentic as the fraught geopolitics of Unknown, the best of the Neeson/Collet-Serra joints, and that film was utterly bonkers. Unknown hasn’t aged a day, while The Commuter feels old already, partly since age and blatant stuntman-substitution come to us all in the end. Sic transit gloria punch-up.
