 Rating: 3.0/5.0 |
CHICAGO– “The Girl On The Train” is a decent enough “Book Club” movie potboiler – it passes the time away, but never quite rises above the pulpiness of its source material. It desperately wants to recreate the suburban upper-class ennui and tone from last year’s “Gone Girl.” But while that film had David Fincher behind the camera, this one has Tate Taylor, the director of “The Help.”
The film stars Emily Blunt as Rachel, an alcoholic British ex-pat sipping vodka from a water bottle, and fantasizing about the life she once led in the tony upstate New York Suburb of Ardsley-On-Hudson. She takes the train into Manhattan twice a day, staring at her ex-husband (Justin Theroux), his new wife and their daughter in the house she used to share. She also becomes obsessed with the young couple next door, Megan (Haley Bennett) and her hunky husband Scott (Luke Evans), but she soon suspects not all is as it seems. Megan mysteriously turns up missing after Blunt gets blackout drunk, gets off the train at her old stomping grounds, and wakes up covered in blood and with a head wound.
Emily Blunt is Railroaded in ‘The Girl on the Train’
Photo credit: Universal Pictures
The film retains the book’s three narratives, switching back and forth between Rachel, Megan – a bored sexpot nanny and housewife – and Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), her husband’s second wife. But Taylor puts the story on shuffle, flipping back and forth in time seemingly at random (much as he did with the James Brown biopic “Get On Up”), in an effort that confuses, rather than engages, the audience.
There’s the usual mix of sex, betrayal and faux Hitchcock voyeurism at play, but this is not the kind of tightly constructed mystery you can savor. It’s more like a plot-hole-ridden time waster that becomes rather pointless as soon as the audience figures out the solution to its easily solvable mystery.
Emily Blunt does a reasonably good job, eschewing glamor for the drab wardrobe and the expression of a commuter drudging through life. And although she never quite transcends the un-likeableness of her character, she never ceases to be watchable. Also, at least, Tate Taylor’s poor man’s David Fincher imitation serves him better than his other efforts, even if he lacks an iota of Fincher’s understanding of how to make a movie.
Haley Bennett and Justin Theroux in ‘The Girl on the Train’
Photo credit: Universal Pictures
You could do worse than “The Girl On The Train,” and I never found myself checking my watch or thinking the movie had completely gone off the rails. But it never finds a way to make itself anything more than something you’d probably watch on a train, just to stave off boredom for a few hours.
 | By SPIKEWALTERS |
