Theme: Hijacking

The Commuter (2018) – Liam Neeson

This movie kicks off with some terribly tedius non-plot quasi drama scenes that attempt to build backstory but are executed in a seeminly intentionally messy muddled way.

Within 10 minutes, things start to get real, as Liam Neeson‘s NPC type character gets a rude awakening in the form of an unexpected termination from work. But the movie goes straight back to muddled drama mode.

20 minutes in, it starts to get interesting, as Neeson’s character meets a strange woman who sets him a challenge with a large cash prize, and the core concept of this movie begins to reveals itself.

Around half way in, Neeson’s character gets framed for the murder of an FBI agent, all the while staying on a commuter train where he’s been for most of the movie already. At this point, this movie looks set to be rated Watchable – no more, since the first half has been so boring with such little going on. Sure, there’s a vibe of mystery among the semi-helpless angst but that’s literally the entire movie thus far summed up already, so it’s not a great fit for an action hero movie fan but not completely off the mark either.

Unfortunately, this movie doesn’t get any better until the last half hour. The angty stress & tension takes a long time to subside. It turns into a bit of a horror train ride in the secod half, and takes forever to let up. It’s a very one dimensional movie in this respect, and falls short of the ideal vibe us action hero movie connoisseurs are most interested in. But it’s not completely off the mark – Neeson still plays a bit of an adept hero – kind of. He especially comes into his own in the last half an hour, when he takes the lead and starts telling everyone on the crashed train what to do, to help them survive. From that moment on, he gets more dominant as the movie goes on, until in the closing scene he’s full re-instated as a cop and re-finds the woman behind the phonecalls.

In the end, I rate it So-So. A couple levels down from Bang Average, and just a few levels up from utterly Unwatchable. But this doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it at all – it’s still a level above Watchable.

Non-Stop (2014) – Liam Neeson

This movie begins with Liam Neeson‘s character acting rather stressed and dazed in an airport, ignoring random people who speak to him, and looking at everyone suspiciously, especially a man dressed like a traditional muslim. Within 5 minutes you can probably guess where this movie is going, and why it’s been commissioned – to make everyone look at everyone suspiciously in public places, especially airports and train stations etc – and especially muslims. And the speech by the actual hijacker in the last 15 minutes is really pushing this narrative hard, so much that if you’ve ever seen this movie before, you might be tempted to switch off at that point in order to skip that nonsense while knowing you’re not missing anything special in the ending. Anyway, there’s nothing new about Neeson pansying to this kind of agenda, so let’s get back to seeing how the movie goes down.

In the 11th hour, ahem, the 11th minute, things finally start to get the slightest bit interesting, as Neeson’s character texts a message to someone saying “we are go” when the plane’s about to go. This tells us he’s probably doing some kind of job on that plane, but we still don’t know quite what it is.

In the 15th minute we see he is indeed an air marshall, or at least, he has the gun and badge of one while on the plane. Then one minute later, someone starts texting him, to mess with him, and the movie really kicks in, as the anonymous texter threatens to kill someone every 20 minutes until 150 million dollars is paid into his account.

The movie proceeds into a session of scrutinising all the passengers, trying to figure out who is the killer. In the real world, of course, bank accounts get frozen very easily, so this whole “wire me the ransom money” concept that’s so common in movies like this, is utter nonsense.

This one a very gritty, suspenseful action mystery movie with an extremely simple yet still confusing plot until the last 15 minuts. I have to rate it Below Average, and even that’s complimentary considering the BS it’s pushing. First time viewers may rate it more highly, but when you remember the vague outline of the story, there’s not much left to rewatch it for, until several years later by which time you’ve mostly forgotten how it goes and can kind of enjoy it again until it get ridiculous near the end in which case you might want to switch off early.

Cleaner (2025) – Daisy Ridley

Although it stars a celebrity of massive Star Wars fame in Daisy Ridley, this movie sits somewhere between Hollywood and B-movie level. It reeks of indie-level production. It seems like a British production with mostly sub-par acting. The camerawork ranges from not bad, to annoying – there’s too often too much zoom on emotional faces doing bad acting, which makes for an uncomfortable viewing experience at times.

The plot starts gaining momentum from around half an hour in, when a building gets hijacked. Prior to that it’s little more than irritating drama. Once it warms up, the action is a bit thin, and drama is a bit OTT, and the quality of acting is mostly weak. Daisy Ridley’s character doesn’t actually enter the building to properly tackle the baddies until 45 minutes later. That’s a massive fail of this movie, from an action hero movie point of view – how the lead star never actually gets inside the building to properly fight the baddies until the last 20 minutes of the movie! What a non-descript drama-fest.

The autistic guy namedropped Piers Morgan a few times, including asking “what would Piers Morgan do”, which makes me think he may have personally sponsored this movie in an attempt to improve his own public image.

I rate this movie Barely Watchable. It’s several levels down from Bang Average, and just one level up from Unwatchable. I’m really surprised to see Daisy Ridley get involved with of movie of this calibre. Maybe she’s struggling to find work these days. Maybe she’s being blanked by Hollywood for walking away from their darker antics – if ever I found that to be the case, she will have earnt my respect, but as it stands, this movie is bad – real bad, and barely watchable at the best of times. I honestly recommend just giving it a miss – it’s a desperate waste of time unless you’re tragically bored stiff already. Would you believe it actually had a Box Office release, grossing over 1 million dollars? It even had a budget of 25 million dollars – I wonder where that money went. Maybe this movie was really just a money laundering exercise. They successfully managed to make nearly 24 million bucks disappear. I almost feel embarrassed for wasting my time sitting through this movie and taking the time to review it on this site. The things I do so you don’t have to!

Thunderball (1965) – Sean Connery

Thunderball is the 4th movie in the James Bond saga and the fourth time Sean Connery plays the leading role – he does a good job as usual.

This movie gets off to an interesting start, with a cross-dressing agent trying to trick James Bond, who kills him and takes time to throw some flower over his body before running away and escaping from the rooftop via jetpack to his bag-of-tricks car. We then begin to hear the Thunderball theme tune by Tom Jones, all within the first 5 minutes.

It’s good to see Desmond Llewelyn back as Q, around the 1 hour mark.

This movie is a bit slower, more monotonous and more one-dimensional and yet still messier than Goldfinger, but not devastatingly so.

The main antagonist in this movie is Emilio Largo (Spectre’s “Number 2” agent) played fairly well by Adolfo Celi although he’s probably a bit podgy and effeminate for such an active top agent in such a physically demanding role.

There are several women in this movie but none get significant enough screen time or deliver a significant enough performance to be particularly worth mentioning here, although it’s good to see the return of Martine Beswick after the strong impression she made in her minor role (in the gypsy girls’ cat-fight) in From Russia With Love – two Bond movies ago.

Derailed (2002) – Jean-Claude Van Damme

Derailed is train hijacking movie a twist – the twist being there’s also a contagion released on the train. It’s a bit like Under Siege 2 in how there’s an elusive good guy (Van Damme instead of Seagal) taking out all the hijackers one by one. And it’s a bit like Transporter 2 in how it pushes contagion theory with all the usual trappings.

It gets off to a low budget but attention sustaining beginning, then it gets extremely one dimensional in the second half when the contagion is released. Still, with decent acting and interesting cast members, I rate this movie somewhere between So-So and OK. On a par with other semi-weak Van Damme movies like Cyborg, Death Warrant and Double Team, all of which have a similar balance of entertainment and unpleasantry in their own unique ways.

This movie also features Van Damme’s real life son, Kris, who plays Van Damme’s character’s son in this movie, and shows off some of his own high kicks early on.