The BQ loves a good suspense movie and/or novel, but we're afraid this race to hit the 'Gone Girl' jackpot will end up going the same way as the studios' once intense but now soured love affair with Young Adult dystopia novels following the success of 'Hunger Games'. (Anyone remember or care about "Beautiful Creatures", "Mortal Instruments" or the abruptly abandoned "Divergent" series? Thought so...) After two or three of these 'next Gone Girl' movies tank badly, we expect the film execs will want to consign any similar books to the Lifetime Movie channel.
Exhibit A in this downward slide is the glum and gloomy adaptation of the Paula Hawkins bestseller "The Girl On The Train". This features a host of URs (Unreliable Narrators, whose mission, similar to Kellyanne Conway's "Bagdad Bob" stints on cable news networks, is to utterly bamboozle, misdirect and otherwise hoodwink you....mystery authors employ their URs to make your mouth gape wide open when the story unleashes its BIG TWIST reveal...) The leader of the UR pack here, a drunk, depressed divorcee (Emily Blunt) aimlessly rides New York commuter trains in a Vodka fueled haze, In addition to nursing the booze, she also cultivates a 'Rear Window' obsession on two other URs whose homes sit conveniently trackside. (To our annoyed confusion, the two women URs are look-alike blondes, which doesn't help when sorting out the convoluted plot...) One of the URs(Rebecca Ferguson) has a new baby with Blunt's ex-husband, as well living in the house Blunt and her Ex once shared.....the other UR (Hayley Bennet) seems to have a lovey-dovey life with her hubby while serving as Ferguson's nanny.....until Blunt spies her canoodling with some other guy.....or does she? A brutal murder ensues and predictably, everyone's casting a withering, suspicious eye on Blunt.
Here's the problem......as directed by Tate Taylor ("The Help") absolutely none of this has the wicked snap and visual finesse that David Fincher brought to "Gone Girl." You could sense Fincher's witty, nasty directorial hand as he fashioned a warped fun-house mirror view of marital toxicity....it made you laugh and gasp at the sheer outrageousness of it. The only laughter in "Girl On The Train" comes unintentionally......Taylor, lacking any visual style and the morbid humor you need to approach this material, duly slogs his way through the film as if he's trying for an Oscar-bait Important Drama. Not gonna happen. Give us a break, Tate.....you forgot you're making a pulpy airport lounge thriller, not "The Help" with unhappy lying white women. (Not every director can take on this genre....another Gillian Flynn thriller "Dark Places" yielded a dull, unbearable film adaptation, even with the game presence of Charlize Theron.....it landed directly on Wal Mart racks with little or no fanfare....)
Relentlessly ordinary in execution and not a bit entertaining to sit through,...we'll reliably punch this movie's train ticket only twice...2 stars...**.
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