Film/TV

Curtains Up on The Girl on the Train

Read the book. Skip the movie.

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The Girl on the Train is a mess.  A thriller with no thrills. If the filmmakers thought this was in the same league as the similar in tone and the much better Gone Girl, then they have no idea what they’re doing. What they have here is a pot boiler that never amounts to what the trailers and marketing suggest.

Emily Blunt plays Rachel, a self destructive alcoholic, who spies on her old neighbourhood from the window of a train that she takes to work.  One day she senses something is not right.  She witnesses Megan (Haley Bennet), a sexy suburban wife she admires daily, possibly having an affair. To make matters even stranger, Megan goes missing and the sauced Rachel becomes a suspect. Now that plot point could be the basis for a great movie. Not here. We get introduced to an array of other characters, each more cliched then the next. The timid housewife, the sexy shrink, the loving husband, the potential criminal, the headstrong detective. It’s a who’s who of the crime genre but no one is given anything to do but look worried and speculate. All these characters take away from the central story of Rachel, who for an alcoholic, gets sober extremely fast when she starts figuring out the whole mystery.  Everything in this film is too convenient. The major reveal is — lets just say you’ll figure it out by half way mark.

For me, it’s the logic. The screen logic is wrong.  The film jumps back and forth in it’s time line that it is so confusing. Maybe in the novel, which I did not read, this works. But on the screen, it doesn’t. The dialogue is laughable.  I’ll bet half of what these actors are saying on screen are thoughts in the book. No senisble human beings talk like this.   There is an exchange between Megan and her skink ( Edgar Ramirez) that is so poorly written that I started to laugh. Director Tate Taylor (The Help) is out of his element here. Here, he is trying to be Alfred Hitchcock. Try harder.

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