The Girl on the Train is directed by Tate Taylor and stars Emily Blunt and this is the adaptation
of the extremely popular novel of the same name. Emily blunt plays a very broken
woman who is dealing with alcoholism, who rides a train every day and lives vicariously
through the people that she views through the windows. She makes up stories
about how she thinks they may live. And these fantasies she develops with these
people in her head are what keep her going every day. Until she sees something
that shocks her and leads her down a very dark path, to a place where a ‘whodunit’
mystery develops and we as the audience have to figure out what is truth and what
is fiction, as this character also tries to figure out the same thing.
The marketing
for this movie was really intense, it really beat you over the head, it was
trying to make you think this movie was gonna be incredible. A lot of people
have compared to Gone Girl because of similar themes. Every poster had the
tagline ‘What did she see?’ in big bold
letters all the commercial said this. ‘The
thriller that shocked the world’ was what I kept hearing and so naturally,
I was excited for this movie, because of course it was gonna shock me too
right?
…
In reality,
this is an emotionally vapid, dull, lifetime channel original movie given the
Hollywood treatment, and an extremely overhyped marketing campaign to get
everyone really interested in a film that's pretty much emotionally weightless.
For the first few minutes of this movie, I was like ‘man Emily Blunt is really delving
deep into this role this could be a really impressive film, I can't wait to see
where this story goes’. But as the movie progresses and progresses… and continuously
progresses and keeps progressing, I kept waiting for the movie to start and I think
maybe about an hour and it starts. Everything before that is just a train ride (pun
intended) to a destination that you're waiting to eventually get to, and once
you get there it's okay, you’re like ‘alright that's interesting’ but then the
movie divulges into extreme melodramatic territory, where characters make
decisions that are purely based on hopefully shocking you, or maybe getting
that extra dramatic punch in there when it really doesn't seem to work.
There are
really fine performances in this movie. Emily Blunt is a lot better than this movie
deserves. Rebecca Ferguson who was excellent and Rogue Nation is also really
good here and Haley Bennett ‘at times’ is very good. Luke Evans is also good in
this film, Allison Janney shows up and is excellent as a detective was trying
to figure out what's going on. But for the most part, the performers in this
movie are entirely reliant on whether or not the screenplay decides to give
them good dialogue for the scene or Twilight fanfiction and dialogue. The
dialogue in this screenplay goes in so many different directions, it goes from
being good, to acceptable, to awful in the flash of a few minutes.
My next
criticism is going to contain mild spoilers, so I'm just going to warn you. This
is my best way to describe this film though. It starts out… fairly okay, and
you're like ‘this could be compelling, this could be an interesting narrative’
and by the end of it, you realize it's just one of those movies where every
character has had sex with each other and they want to try to ring every little
bit of drama out of it they can. This film has some good performances, it has a
story that could have been interesting, but the execution especially from
Taylor does not fit this film. I found his direction to be very flat filled
with odd choices, like using low framerate photography, which really made it
look very ugly sometimes. And I just did not feel that his direction really
added much to this story. In fact I think it detracted from it, and this is coming
from the guy who made a movie ‘The Help’, which I thought was good. I don't really
know what happened with this film. This is a film that has good marketing and good
performances… and that's about it.
Grade - C-
This film missed
just about every opportunity it had to be a great film. I don't know what
happened
No comments:
Post a Comment