Film review: THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN (Tate Taylor, 2016)

Rachel, a depressed 30-something alcoholic, embarks on a destructive Groundhog Day of a routine: taking a train which goes past her ex husband's house and peering at his newfound state of matrimonial bliss with the woman he cheated on her with, and their baby.

A few houses down from this seemingly perfect family is another equally photogenic, younger, couple, Megan and Scott, who have a penchant for shagging in clear view of commuters. One day, on her usual voyeuring, Rachel notices that Megan has switched up sexual partners, and, bringing up dark memories of her own, she reacts adversely, getting wasted and getting off the train at the station where she used to live. A while later, Megan goes missing.

In the title role, Emily Blunt is fantastic, giving a career best  turn. Her Rachel would be laughable if she weren't so pathetic, sipping vodka out of a plastic bottle, scaring off other commuters with her slurred speech and still pining for a relationship that long outgrew her.

Due to blackouts she gets from her deleterious drinking problem, her memory on the night of Megan's departure is hazy, rendering her a compelling yet unreliable narrator. Usually such a beautiful woman, Blunt de-glams considerably to play Rachel, looking quite rough indeed. She also convincingly plays drunk, no mean feat, given most attempts to act inebriated usually veer into insufferable caricature (see: Jennifer Lawrence as Rosalyn in American Hustle). 

With a stagger and slurred speech, Blunt evokes sympathy from the audience for such a broken woman, particularly her impassioned drunken monologues, which could be given from many a hammered young woman I’ve encountered on the 11.15pm train home, haha. That she was completely sober during filming (Blunt was pregnant), renders her performance even more remarkable.

As the audience tries to discern fact from fabrication, Megan and Anna, Tom's new wife, enter the fray with their narratives. In the novel, the story is told from the P.O.V. of all three of these women, but in film form, such a fussy storytelling device is frustrating and distracting. The end product feels like a very poor man's Rashômon, not aided by an awful script that features, amongst other things, whiny voiceovers from Rachel and Megan, and clunky conversations between characters. Note to the screenwriter: lines like 'I'm not the girl I used to be', and 'I'm the mistress of re-invention' don't really suit the big screen. They'd be better suited to stage. Or a bad shampoo commercial.

Furthermore, every single character in The Girl on the Train, from the therapist who Megan was confiding in to the incompetent cop investigating the case, are unlikable. The three main males in the film were all quite misogynistic in their own ways, and thus, I simply wasn't engaged with the plot. You find yourself not really caring what happened to Megan, and whodunnit. Although the plot 'twist', when it hits, is as contrived as it is predictable.

Finally, the film suffers from a crisis of identity, as Tate Taylor wants it to be both sensual (sex scenes pepper the film, but they’re loveless, mechanical, and as a result, completely unerotic) and unsettling at the same time. What he actually gets is a movie that is both bland and dull.

Emily Blunt deserves a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her tremendously convincing depiction of a fragile woman. Whether she gets one remains to be seen, but sadly, I have my doubts; it is a strong year for Best Actress with buzz surrounding a three-way frontrunner status for Emma Stone in La La Land, Natalie Portman in Jackie and hopefully the eventual winner, Viola Davis in Fences (it's Viola's time!).

Usually, for an actress to get nominated for her performance in a thriller (a genre that is not really one of Oscars' preferred), the film has to have fared well with the moviegoing public, as Gone Girl (the third highest grossing 18-rated movie in the UK after 50 Shades of Grey and Wolf of Wall Street) and Girl with the Dragon Tattoo did. What those two films had, which The Girl on the Train lacks, was an extremely adroit director in the form of David Fincher, who's dexterous ability to manipulate the audience helped Rosamund Pike and Rooney Mara, respectively, give performances that transcended their films' pulpy roots.

Tate Taylor is, lamentably, a less gifted storyteller, seems to feel that, when all else fails, he can always go to Plan B: heavy-handed close-ups of Blunt's blotchy face. The actress deserves so much better than the director, or the film, have to offer.

5/10

Film review: THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (Antoine Fuqua, 2016)

The town of Rose Creek is terrorised by mercenary Bart Bogue and his henchmen, who wishes to mine it for oil. In standing up to the villains, several innocent people are slaughtered in cold blood, including Matthew Cullen, leaving his grieving widow Emma (Haley Bennett) seeking retribution. She implores bounty hunter Sam Chisolm (Denzel Washington) to defend her townspeople, a request he initially declines, until he hears who the enemy is. 

However, Sam alone isn't enough to overturn Bart's army, so he recruits wayward gambler Josh Faraday (Chris Pratt) using Josh's horse as barter. Faraday then enlists the help of Sam's former acquaintance, a sharpshooter named Goodnight Robicheaux (Ethan Hawke) and gets his companion, assassin Billy Rocks (Byung-hun Lee), thrown in for free. The foursome are rounded off with wanted outlaw Vasquez (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), giant Jack Horne (Vincent D'Onofrio),  and a Comanche warrior Red Harvest (Martin Sensmeier).

The trailer for The Magnificent Seven was so cool and enticing that it made me momentarily forget my aversion for needless Hollywood remakes, of which Oldboy is the worst of a sorry bunch from recent years. But, in Antoine Fuque's plodder of a film, I realised that the film peaked at the strategic bass drop on the ad.

The film's four most well-known stars: Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke and Peter Sarsagaard barely make it out of first gear. Pratt and Sarsgaard, in particular, both who have done exemplary work in the past, phone it in on crushingly disappointing levels.  Pratt, so charismatic in Guardians of the Galaxy, seems to think he can ride on the memory of his charm in this film, and exhibits no attempt at characterisation in his role. Waving his hands around to do a card trick is about the most he exerts himself.

Sarsgaard is equally limp as the villain, to the point where it detriments the film. Because The Magnificent Seven then lacks a compelling antagonist, it renders all the expensive (the film had had a eye-watering budget of $95 million) training montages shown in the film hollow, because we're simply not afraid of the force they're all priming themselves to face.

For the Training Day fans out there, of which I am one, the scenes between Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke lack the spice and spark that the two organically just had in Antoine Fuqua's earlier film. This is as much to blame on the clunky screenplay as it does the performers, where practically every character in the film speaks in (not very incisive, it has to be said) one-liners but strung together, it doesn't come close to resembling dialogue.

The cast member who makes the most lasting impression is pretty Haley Bennett as Emma, who the script graciously refrains from making a damsel in distress trope. Bennett fleshes out a 2D(ish) character into something resembling a human with a beating heart, and her early scenes where she pleads to Chisolm's sense of humanity do carry genuine pathos.

Perhaps rising star Bennett (who will next be seen in October's release The Girl on the Train), unlike the four male movie stars who I've named and shamed, actually bothered in Magnificent Seven because she cannot yet rest on the laurels of her name alone. The supporting cast also feature some witty turns, especially South Korean actor Byung-hun Lee who throws knives with panache and inhibits his taciturn/cool character with ease, and the always memorable Vincent D'Onofrio, who plays against his formidable physicality as surprisingly soft-spoken tracker.

There are a few gripping action sequences (which were the main contributor to my generous decision to award The Magnificent Seven 6/10), but they could all have been trimmed by at least 20% in the editing room. The final set piece dragged far too much and caused the payoff to feel frustratingly anti-climactic.

The Magnificent Seven touches upon topics of substance such as male companionship, the destructive nature of greed, carrying the guilt of one's actions (Hawke's character is crippled with bouts of PTSD) and bigotry, but they are all dealt with and resolved in a very superficial, Hollwood manner. Some of the cinematography is nice and the iconography of the seven men riding on horses will certainly make for some decent gifs. But sadly, The Magnificent Seven proved to be a lot less than the sum of its parts.

Not so magnificent, after all.

6/10

The Girl on the Bus

I’m a huge Emmy Blunt fan. She’s gorgeous, talented, and that West London accent does funny things to me. I even stood outside in the rain last year during the Sicario premiere just to get a glimpse of her, which resulted in me having a cold for a week just as I was beginning my thesis, so that was a bit foolish. (To add to the nonsensicalness of that exercise, I still haven’t gotten round to seeing Sicario . It’s just not my genre).

Anyway, I was really excited by The Girl on the Train trailer when I first saw it. The content looked extremely intriguing and dark, invariably evoking memories of Gone Girl. After all, both are big-screen adaptations of best-selling thrillers with a beautiful British actress playing the lead, unreliable narrators and the word ‘Girl’ in the title.

Furthermore, the employment of a remix of Kanye West’s Heartless was dope; it rivalled War Dogs’ using a cover of No Church in the Wild in terms of ‘using a Kanye song to entice the audience’ stakes (although the best use of Kanye West in a film trailer is still, IMO, Power in The Social Network trailer. The conflation of the lyrics [‘No one man should have all that power’] and the plot of that film, especially Jesse Eisenberg’s superb performance as a hubristic megalomaniac, is just so astute).

However, my interest in The Girl on the Train dwindled slightly when I saw it only got rated 15. I was hoping it was going to be the second 2016 film that I’d seen that was 18-rated, the other being the rather unremarkable The Neon Demon. I saw 5 2015 releases that were an 18 (Diary of a Teenage Girl, Fifty Shades of Grey, The Hateful Eight, Legend, Knock Knock), so I’d really be hoping to match that amount of 18s watched this year. But nah, The Girl on the Train is only a 15.

Not only that, it got a 15A in Ireland, who unlike the BBFC, have the 16 rating that they slap on movies that sit in that awkward 15/18 hinterland. But the fact that the Irish film board didn’t even need to get a 16 out tells me it’s not even gonna be a hard 15!

Boring.

So there goes my hopes of this film being 2016’s Gone Girl.

How could they be so heartless?