The Girl on the Train
(Tate Taylor)
The Girl on the Train is one of the biggest selling debut novels ever, a book that was fast published to nip at the heels of the success of Flynn's Gone Girl. It makes sense that Hollywood would want to capitalize on this as well. The novel of The Girl on the Train will always be in Gone Girl's shadow, whether it's warranted or not and Tate Taylor's film suffers the same fate. Fincher had great success with Gone Girl, Taylor doesn't do the book justice and the book isn't even that great.
Rachel takes a train to and from New York everyday. While on her commute she always notices one couple from one house, this is Scott and Megan. She's never met them, but she likes to make up imaginary lives for them, thinking they are the perfect couple. One day, she sees Megan with another man and it turns her whole world upside down. Yet, can her judgement be trusted? She suffers from an addiction to alcohol, something she was driven to after her failed marriage with her husband Tom. Tom just so happens to live two houses down from Scott and Megan with his new wife and child, living in the same house Rachel use to live in. Things go from bad to worse when Megan goes missing and Rachel purposely inserts herself into the investigation to find out the truth.
There seems to be a lot going on by this description, but truth be told, the film fails to have any of it be interesting. You'd think that a mystery of a girl gone missing and having an unreliable narrator make for some suspense, but Taylor never creates any. The film feels hollow at its core and unfortunately it never manages to be what it tries so hard to be, which is a successful thriller. I ask myself, at what point was this film suspenseful? All of it is held until the last ten minutes, the reveal if you will, even then it's a fizzle. The biggest problem with the film is how boring it is. I'm watching this film from a viewpoint of a reader from the book. Yet I can't help but feel that if I hadn't read the book, that the reveal at the end would still be a predictable slug. The viewer gets to the ending well before the film does and you are sitting there just waiting for this film to catch up.
There are numerous "suspects" in the film and it wants you to believe in every single one of them, but anyone who watches a film knows that none of these people will turn out to be responsible. The book is told from 3 perspectives, Rachel, Megan and Anna, who is Tom's new wife. The film tries to juggle these perspectives throughout the almost 2 hour running time and not surprisingly is fumbles. Rachel, played by Emily Blunt is clearly the main focus. Megan, played by Haley Bennett, my favourite performance, has her story mostly told through flashbacks. Finally there is Anna, played by Rebecca Ferguson, whom I didn't even recognize until I started writing this review, is given the least amount of things to do.
On the other side of things we have Justin Theroux, Luke Evans and Edgar Ramirez as the three supporting male characters. Theroux is the perfect husband on the outside, but could possibly be hiding something sinister underneath. Evans is the husband of the missing woman, a man with anger issues and abuse claims. The look of him is intimidating enough for some and finally Ramirez as Megan's therapist with questionable morals. Each performance, while fine, serves the role written on the paper and none stand out beyond the page. The one performance in the whole film that goes above and beyond may be Blunt's, to the point of annoyance. Rachel is a drunk and Blunt goes for broke with her "drunk" performance. I really hated the character of Rachel in the books and Blunt does nothing to really win me over with the performance in the film either.
The film doesn't faulted because of the performances, those are fine for the most part. It suffers from the direction. Taylor does absolutely nothing to make the film memorable, to make it look enticing, to make it worth watching. The film bored me and I don't really get bored during films. Taylor does nothing to make me care for the mystery at the core of this story. I really wanted this film to be good, to be suspenseful and work as an adult thriller. It fails to do those things and it's one of the bigger disappointments of the year.
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it's a movie after all
