The Commuter and The Negotiator (aka Beirut) - two 2018 films

When I travelled to Florida recently, the long trip gave me time to read a number of books and to watch a number of movies. Today I'll talk about a couple of the films I watched, two thrillers that made for good aeroplane entertainment.

Liam Neeson is an actor I really like; his combination of crumpled charm and ordinary man turned tough guy heroics isn't easy to resist even if his performances follow a very similar pattern. In The Commuter, he plays a decent family man down on his luck, an ex-cop who is sacked from his job through no fault of his own. As always in films and television, the dismissal is conducted in an off-the-cuff manner that (after my years as an employment lawyer) I find risibly crude and implausible because it's an invitation to litigation that no boss in his right mind would risk. But since it's not a story about employment law, perhaps this is nothing to worry about unduly.

On the train back home, Neeson is approached by a pleasant, mysterious woman, who offers him $100,000 dollars to undertake an apparently simple task. Needless to say, there's a catch...before long, he's involved in a frantic race against time to find which of his fellow passengers is a mysterious character called Prynne, and to figure out why it matters. Yes, it's hokum, but it makes for enjoyable and exciting viewing.

The Negotiator, also known as Beirut, features another class act, Jon Hamm, in the lead role. He plays Mason Skiles, a top diplomat in the Lebanon whose life is wrecked in 1972, when his wife is killed. He returns to the US, and becomes a workplace negotiator before being summoned back to Beirut when his old friend Cal is kidnapped by terrorists.

The screenplay is written by Tony Gilroy, responsible for the Bourne movies, and it's quite accomplished, but it seemed to me that Gilroy was trying to achieve something more than an action thriller, and I'm not quite sure he managed it. Hamm's relationship with Rosamund Pike, one of the kidnap negotiation team, for instance, is rather inadequately developed, while the eternally elaborate politics of the Middle East are tackled in a serious way, but without casting any real light. John Le Carre would, I think, have made more of the material. So what we are left with is an action movie, and it's a perfectly good one, hardly memorable, but a very good way to spend time on a long flight. 

The Town - movie review

Films about bank robberies run the risk of following a formula, and one of the things that I enjoyed about the 2010 movie The Town was that it offered a fresh (at least to me) variation on the theme. In this film, the smartest of the robbers does something not very smart – he falls in love with the manager of the bank he has just robbed. Mind you, given that the manager is played by the very attractive Rebecca Hall, it's not entirely an implausible plot twist.

The film is set in Boston, and the "town" of the title is Charlestown, an area apparently associated with violent crime, although on one view, that negative images unfair and out of date. I don't know the truth of it, but I must say that, the more I see of Boston in the movies, the keener I am to visit the city one day. I get a very strong impression of a truly fascinating place.

Ben Affleck directs the film and also plays the lead character – very effectively and sensitively, I thought. His backstory is neatly conveyed, without slowing the action, as is his relationship with his fellow criminals. The mastermind behind the robberies is, of all things, a florist (that was a touch of imaginative storytelling that I enjoyed!) played by Pete Postlethwaite, who is very well cast as a menacing villain. Postlethwaite, who died of cancer earlier this year, is an actor who always made a strong impression, and he's a real loss to the cinema.

I found this film gripping throughout. I've seen one or two reviews that compare it to Heat, starring Al Pacino, but personally I thought The Town was significantly better. Affleck and Rebecca Hall are both highly charismatic, and Jon Hamm does a good job as the detective pursuing them. Among heist films, I'd rate this one very highly.