Editor’s Note: Any Liam Neeson fans out there? Freeline Media critic Mike Fried thinks the actor has made some beauties, and in his latest column, he explores Liam’s work with director Jaume Collett-Serra. Read on!
By Mike Fried
[voiceover] Way out east in Ireland there was this fella … fella I wanna tell ya about. Fella by the name of Liam Neeson. At least that was the handle his loving parents gave him. And he had some skills. And there is another guy, another guy I wanna tell you about. Fella by the name of Jaume Collett-Serra who is a director and he made some good movies. But then he got to make a movie with this Neeson fella and things changed. He, uh, he uh, Aw. I lost my train of thought here. But… aw, hell. I’ve done introduced them enough.
Anyway, Neeson and Collett-Serra collaborated on three films (four, actually, but we won’t talk about Run All Night) and these three films are in the vein of Hitchcock – full of suspense and action and plot twists – and they entertain. They are Unknown, Non-Stop and The Commuter. The quality of the films are in order of their appearance but all are worthy of watching.
UNKNOWN
4/5
A man and his wife go to Berlin for a conference. When he gets to his hotel, he realizes his briefcase with his passport has been lost. He gets back into a cab and gets into an accident. Four days later when he gets back to his hotel, his wife does not know who he is.
Jaume Collet-Serra and Liam Neeson have made several movies together, but this, their first, is hands-down, their best collaboration.
This is one of the films that can truly be considered Hitchcockian. Neeson plays a man totally out of his depth, and every shred of evidence indicates that the man who is impersonating him is really him. Whether it’s a passport or whether it’s a website from his university, the imposter’s photograph is appended to it. He seeks help from the driver of the taxi that crashed into the river, played by Diane Kruger.
This is really a fun movie. It takes a while; but a little bit at a time, the bits and pieces start to fall together as Neeson figures out who he is and why someone is impersonating him.
When I first watched it, I was fixated on the screen because the story was so well woven. And 14 years after seeing it, it still holds my attention. Liam Neeson is just so good as is Diane Kruger, January Jones as the wife who doesn’t recognize him and Aidan Quinn as the imposter are also terrific. Bruno Ganz, Sebastian Koch and Frank Langella round out the amazing cast and, quite frankly, give the film a lot of street cred.
But it’s a crackling script and adroit direction that keep the audience as off-kilter as Neeson’s character is. And that’s where this film excels.
I dig it!
WATCH IT!
NON-STOP
3.5/5
Jaume Collet-Serra does an interesting thing in the first few minutes of the movie Non-Stop. Via the shared misery process of going through airport security and boarding the aircraft, we are introduced to all of the major and minor characters within the film.
We first see Bill Marks in a car at an airport. He is obviously aggrieved. He grouses his way through security. He grouses his way onto the plane and he settles in for a ride to London. But along the way he gets a text, a text demanding that $150,000,000 be sent to a particular account or within 20 minutes someone will die. He tries to figure out who it is. And the thing is, the account is in Bill’s name
Is it his fellow air marshal (Anson Mount), is it the kid on 9b (Jon Abrahams) is it the suspicious looking bald guy, an NYPD cop (Corey Stoll) is it the stewardess (Lupita Nyong’o) is it the other stewardess (Michelle Dockery) is it the Egyptian doctor (Omar Metwally), is it the smart-mouthed black guy in coach (Corey Hawkins), is it the schoolteacher (Scoot McNairy) is it the pilot or the co-pilot (Linus Roache, Jason Butler Harner) or is it any other number of people in the plane, including the hot redheaded passenger helping him (Julianne Moore).
It is a mystery more than an action film, and Collet-Serra does a terrific job of ratcheting up the tension. 90% of the film was filmed aboard the plane set which looks like authentic but which is not like any other plane configuration we have ever seen in real life. But it suits the production of the film. The plane was built a bit larger to accommodate not only the cameras but Liam Neeson’s 6’4” frame.
And according to Neeson the 90% of the film that was shot on the plane was done so in just a two week period of time. And this makes sense because it is a controlled environment. It was made on a $50mm budget but god bless him, Neeson copped $20mm of that, the largest score of his career.
The film gets a bit illogical and unreal in the third act but it’s still an above average picture because of Liam Neeson’s committed performance as well as some terrific editing that ratchets up the tension. Also, it works because if you think about it our worst fears are about something happening in the air where there is nowhere to go.
And Bill is given no assistance from the ground. A TSA agent with whom he has been communicating doesn’t trust him and asks the pilot to take Bill’s gun and badge.
And without any help Bill needs to figure out what’s going on because if you think passengers are ornery on a regular flight, well this becomes the flight from hell. Especially as a news broadcast on the airplane runs a story about Bill Marks as a terrorist and that this is a hijacking. And the passengers revolt and Neeson kicks some butt. And the discovers that there is a bomb on the plane. A bomb he wasn’t supposed to find.
Ok, it’s an action film but it’s different than the normal films that Neeson has done, for example The Commuter which he did with Collet-Serra.
And it’s a lot of fun. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of “A−” on an A+ to F scale. So it’s made to be a crowd pleaser not an award winner. And it grossed over $220mm worldwide.
So take this flight.
WATCH IT!
THE COMMUTER
3.5/5
In which we meet 60-year-old Michael MacCauley an insurance salesman/ ex-cop who, like all of us, has good days and bad days. This is going to be a bad day when he is first fired for not bringing in enough business and second, when he runs into a mysterious woman on his Metro-North train.
Okay, first things first. I rode the Long Island Rail Road for forty years and one thing I can tell you about commuters – we are creatures of habit. We sit in the same train car, often in the same seat, we kibitz with the people we see every day – or we ignore them, like me, for the most part (noise canceling headphones were made for me). There are nice people and there are assholes. I am not an asshole – I just like to be left alone to read and unwind from a long day’s work.
So Michael MacCauley is reading his book when a woman named Joanna introduces herself and says this is the first time she has been on a commuter train and she engages in chitchat. She asks him a hypothetical question. Would he do something to a person that would have no consequence to him and he will make $100,000. He needs to find a person named Prynne carrying a bag. She knows he is an ex-cop and she knows he is in financial straits. And she leads him to believe that his wife has been kidnapped until he finds the person with the bag. And she can control the train. She stops it just as one of his daily friends gets off the train and she knows he slipped a note to that friend to contact the police and that friend gets hit by a bus.
Like Neeson’s previous movie, Non-Stop, this is a movie that is primarily set in one location – non-stop was on a plane and this is on the slightly less claustrophobic train. And like non-stop, the movie has a whole bunch of characters right out of central casting. As Michael uses his cop skills to find the person, everyone looks suspicious. Since he does not know the “why” the person needs to be found, he needs to focus on the “who”?
It is a very kinetic movie with improbable set pieces. He sees a young goth girl (Florence Pugh!!!) with a bag but she only has fake IDs given to her by her boyfriend. He gets into a fight with another guy but this guy turns up dead.
Collett-Serra is obviously a fan of Hitchcock because three of the four movies he made with Neeson all have a “wrong man”/suspense sensibility to them. The big difference between this film and non-stop is that there is an outside sense of movement. Most of the film was shot on a soundstage with only one train car that was redressed as different cars and the exteriors were filled in with green screens, giving the notion of time elapsing. Non-Stop didn’t have this. It was up to Neeson and the other actors in that film to move around to keep the sense of action going. In this film, it is a race against time and the passing trees let us know this.
There’s a terrific supporting cast. Besides Florence Pugh, whose role was admittedly minor, Vera Farmiga, who is second billed but who only has 6 minutes of screen time oozes evil from every pore. She is a master of psychology and can read her victims, in this case MacCauley, with eerie accuracy. Jonathan Banks has a small role as one of the regulars. Andy Nyman is terrific as a regular named Tony who keeps lending Mike his phone and then curses him for using up the battery. British actor Colin McFarlane is spot-on as Sam the Conductor and he is reminiscent of every seasoned conductor I have ever come across – he disappears into the role he is so good. Danish actor Roland Møller is also good in the limited role he has. And Letitia Wright has a blink and you’ll miss her role. And Sam Neill – rest in peace – and Patrick Wilson are on hand as cops that Mike doesn’t know whether or not he can trust.
There’s great camera work. In the opening sequence, when Michael is dropped off at the station by his wife, they are the same but their clothing changes, the seasons change, their attitude changes – it’s a great bit of editing. In addition, when Michael reaches Grand Central Terminal, everyone is moving super fast while he is moving at a regular pace.
And as they reach the end of the line, the bad guys derail the train but the film is far from over. It almost becomes a Dog Day Afternoon scenario where the police besiege the train and Mike has all the windows covered to protect the remaining passengers. And Mike is willing to give up his own life to protect the innocent passengers aboard.
Liam Neeson completely sells being the at-first confused, then enraged, then protective insurance guy whose cop instincts are second nature and they come out in a big way.
And not everything is what it seems to be. Allies turn out to be bad guys and bad guys turn out to be allies. Who’s a Neeson to trust?
It’s a little dumber than Non-Stop – with an “I am Spartacus” moment that almost ruins it until the punchline of that scene but it is still pure dumb fun.
And the closing credits graphics are excellent and inspired.
WATCH IT!
Michael Fried has no formal training in movies, except having watched over 26,000+ movies — if not more — in his 60-plus years on this planet, starting with Goldfinger as his first cinema experience. He knows what he likes and he knows what he doesn’t like, and it’s quite often different from the conventional wisdom. He knows that the best franchise is Godzilla and he loves action movies and comedies. He has not been nominated for any awards except some boring insurance awards which has no applicability to movies (with the possible exceptions of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and John Cassavettes’ Big Trouble). He is part of a team that won the 1980 SUNY Albany Trivia content by correctly guessing the question, “Who played the president of Klopstockia in Million Dollar Legs?” So he has that going for him, which is nice.
Contact Mike at moviemike3@gmail.com
