The Coppers Are Always With Us-When City Hall Went Amok And Made The Trains Late-Liam Neeson’s “The Commuter” (2018)-A Short Film Review

The Coppers Are Always With Us-When City Hall Went Amok And Made The Trains Late-Liam Neeson’s “The Commuter” (2018)-A Short Film Review   

DVD Review

By Bart Webber

The Commuter, starring Liam Neeson, 2018    

[The constant reader may have noticed a rather long absence of my name from the lists here at Growing Up Absurd In The 1950s. That same reader also knows, or should know, that I was one of the founder members of the sister publication, American Left History, back in the mid-1970s when it was a hard copy publication created at least in part to “save” the late Pete Markin. Pete a guy who got a lot of us into writing, to appreciate the written word, back in the old neighborhood, the Acre neighborhood in growing up in the 1950s North Adamsville south of Boston. Pete the guy who projected the crazy idea, and other ideas that we though were crazy at the time when all we cared about was girls, cars, girls and how to get into their pants, that a new breeze was coming through the land. A time when we would turn the world upside down and in the process give working class, damn, poor ass guys like us a shot at something. He made good on that promise for a while dragging us in his huge wake getting us out for varying periods of time to the Summer of Love, 1967 out in Frisco and all that happened afterward.

That was just a little dream for Pete though because not so much later the Vietnam dragon lady called him, as it did for me and a bunch of those same poor ass working class guys from the Acre who couldn’t figure out a way to get of the draft. Vietnam turned Pete’s dreams into nightmares and his crazy ideas got the better of him when the high tide ebbed and he finally figured that rather than a newer world we were going to get the same fucking over that our parents and grandparents and before even when most of them came out of starving hungry looking for bread Ireland on the “famine ships.” Pete fell down, fell down hard and despite whatever money you would want to have bet then was the first to go under the good green earth.

Maybe strangely since the mid-1970s the core of the old neighborhood boys, the corner boys we called ourselves, kept themselves intact, didn’t fall down maybe seeing what happened to Pete and have lived to fight another day. Now it looks like I will be joining beloved bastard Pete if what the doctors say is true. I have a few rare and spreading cancers which will do me in eventually. The last year or so I have mainly been in one chemo therapy or another, so I have not really been in the mood or condition to do much. But of late the desire to write, the desire that Pete drilled into our brains to flow with words has been upon me. I will write as long as I can and as hard as I can. Thanks Pete.]   

*******

Somebody once said the cops will always be with us meaning that despite the changes in regimes, hell even changes in forms of government somebody always has to guard the loot, keep those in charge from the clawing hands of the unruly masses. (An old wag from the Acre whose family was filled with overweight coppers would add guard the donut shop coffee and crullers as well.) True or not doing that task may actually lead to learning some useful skills if you are ever conned by some come hither dame into playing “hit man” on a fast-moving Metro heading out of New York City. That the case with one Matt Murphy, retired copper and subsequently retired insurance sales man who needed all that copper muscle memory allowed in the film under review The Commuter starring versatile action actor Liam Neeson (now in some bad odor for racially-charged remarks from many years ago about killing a black man in revenge for a rape of a friend who strangely in this film had a serious knock down drag out fight leading to death of a black man who was a paid hit-man-by vocation not by guile with Liam’s character Matt.)        

In the old neighborhood, an Irish Catholic neighborhood filled with the working poor, the indigent and the riffraff, the bottom-feeders who locate there for the easy if sparse pickings those corner boys mentioned in the bracketed introduction above loathed the cops who made our lives hell and who would harass us, take us down to the station for what they called “general principles.” That despite an overload of coppers in all our families-the routine being among Irish family sons a breakdown something like this- one son a priest, with the vocation my grandmother called it with glee, one a gangster doing time in stir on at least one occasion and one a copper getting fat on those guarded coffee and crullers and whatever other graft they could hustle (among the girls one for the nunnery, one with the vocation distaff side also filling my grandmother with glee). That attitude never changed and while most of us have had a long term “truce” with the coppers except maybe for political offenses that is still true. (I haven’t talked to my older brother Larry in about twenty years once I found out he was the guy on the North Adamsville Police Department who was in charge of keeping young black boys from stopping at Adamsville Beach for “general principles”.)    

Still whatever they learn at the Police Academy and on duty must have some value as it did for Matt when he wound up being the “savior” while commuting busting up a bad guy City Hall cabal in the process. The usual corrupt City Hall operation depends on everybody keeping quiet whether they are in on the deal or not. If not then they have to fall down as was the case here. That is where the coppers, not all the coppers but the bad apples as the police press agent flak-catcher would have it, have to keep the unruly mob at bay-or dead. In this case dead. Except there was a slip-up, or rather two. A girl relative of the guy who had to fall down was present when the coppers tried to see if he could fly and she had grabbed the hard-drive proof that guys up to and including people in the Mayor’s office were skimming every dime they could skim for their “retirement.” Including a bad apple cop who was Matt’s old partner when they were working the Dunkin’ Donut beat. Set Matt up knowing he was cash poor and knowing that he had just been let go from his crumb-bum insurance agency for not selling enough life insurance to keep them happy. Couldn’t close the deal anymore, the kiss of death in selling anything from insurance to vacuum cleaners.      

Where does the commuter part come in? Well that is easy once Matt started making serious dough after leaving the cops he and his lovely two point three child family moved to the leafy suburbs, moved outside the crime-ridden, noisy scary city, moved to Tarrytown and the endless commute to earn that daily bread downtown. That is why Matt was “picked” for the job, picked to be the “hit man” ex-cop who could figure out how to ferret out the witness who saw her cousin fall down and who had the hard drive which would have sent everybody to prison. Did I mention that they sealed the deal with a kiss-the kiss of death to his wife and two pint three kids if he fumbled, if he fell down.

But of course Matt wouldn’t once he had his down payment and the prospect of a hundred grand for light work. Matt had lost his edge though because he made about six mistaken identifications before he got the right person-got the witness from hell. Those off-hand deaths just the price, the overhead to make sure his family was okay. After getting that witness and promising her safety all hell broke loose once the City Hall guys knew where he was. They made him an APB psycho holding some fellow commuters hostage complete with SWAT teams and half the cops in Westchester County. Matt came through though and at least one bad guy, gal actually fell down. The lesson to be learned here though in stay a million miles away from the trains, maybe two million. Ride a bike or take Uber or Lyft. And remember despite this Matt’s actions stay away from the coppers, far away.   

You Do Need A Pilot To Know Which Way The Plane Goes-And An Air Marshal To Boot -Liam Neeson’s “Non-Stop”-(2014)-A Film Review

You Do Need A Pilot To Know Which Way The Plane Goes-And An Air Marshal To Boot -Liam Neeson’s “Non-Stop”-(2014)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sandy Salmon

Non-Stop, starring Liam Neeson, Julianne Moore, 2014

This is the first film review I have done in a while since I have been more than happy to let the younger writers get their feet wet in the cutthroat dog eat dog world of contemporary film reviewing where everybody who has seen a film and has access to the Internet has become a film critic-at least in his or her own mind and maybe that of their companions. I laugh every time I think about what another old-time film critic Sam Lowell mentioned a while back about the old days when film reviewers if they didn’t just fob the review off on a younger protégé like I have done a few times of late with my own associate Alden Riley grabbed the copy that the fawning publicity departments at the studios put out to the press, dusted off the copy, cut the top off  and put their names there and submitted the damn thing. And nobody was the wiser. Sometimes when I see what the so-called democratic and universal Internet hath wrought I too long for those old days. *  

The reason I grabbed this film, Liam Neeson’s Non-Stop though is because it deals at least tangentially with the aftermath of 9/11 something which at the personal, social and historic level has changed the way we do the business of living in the world just like December 7, 1941 and November 22, 1963 were other such turning points which negated that fresher, newer world we thought we had going for us. Since I am not giving much away about the plot this story line involves the personal vendetta a guy had against the Federal Air Marshals program for not stopping the horrors of 9/11 a result which included the death of his father in the rumble of the World Trade Center. While this plot is fictious there is enough around in the odd-ball world of conspiracy theorists who have built up a cottage industry proclaiming the inevitable new generation of wild boy false flags that had attached to the earlier Pearl Harbor and Jack Kennedy assassination events. 

Of all the people you would not want to be guarding the security of an airplane on an international flight from New York to London one alcoholic, cigarette-smoking lost soul American Federal Air Marshal Bill Marks, the role well-regarded actor Liam Neeson plays, would be a prime candidate. Especially if trouble was brewing. Needless to say, the trouble comes almost the minute the plane was airborne (and before Bill has had his next drink on the quiet). Some techno-wizard had hacked his cellphone and presented Bill with this professional dilemma. Get, get any way possible, 150 million smackers, dollars not a bad number if you are going to essentially hijack a plane and face the death penalty if you fail or somebody will die every twenty minutes. Guess what-the bodies start falling down like clockwork. For a while Bill was befuddled, can’t figure out who or what is doing the dance of death. All he knew was that everybody was a suspect, everybody had to be checked.       

       

Naturally in a suspense film there have to be a number of false flags, false leads before the real perpetrator or perpetrators are rounded up and neutralized. Now Bill was old-school, an old beat-up, beat-down New York City cop before somebody gave him the lifeline of an air marshal job (despite his fear of flying-oh well) and so he roughed up everybody at 30,000 feet like he was back on the mean streets of the city. Said rough ups producing some deaths which in true false flag fashion are marked against Bill. See the “perp” had figured Bill out for a serious fall guy given his less than stellar profile and had set the poor bastard up to take the fall. To do actions which when the deal goes down will make him look like the guilty party. Bill even puts fellow passenger and eventual love interest Jen, played by Julianne Moore, on the grill. But not to worry Bill once the finger points his way. He gets religion and doubles down on the perps once they up the ante with the old bomb in the suitcase routine, a gag that has been around since about Icarus’s time but which Bill, the pilot, or rather co-pilot since the pilot fell down as part of the dastardly scheme, modern technology and what the hell old fashion grit foiled without too much trouble. Pretty good for a used-up cop fall guy who saved the day against a serious if misplaced grievance. I told you 9/11 made things a lot tenser, made the world less livable in a number of ways. Even in fictional films centered on the topic.

[* I mentioned above some of the pitfalls of  modern day citizen film reviewers and if you Google this film you will find a full array of reviews by those less interested in the suspense of the film than presenting very own theories about Bill in relationship to 9/11 including his having been in the pay variously of the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, the usual CIA deep state gag and the Bush Family Estate. Remember this is a fictional film please, but also remember that there are some very lonely heart folk out there sniffing cyber-ether or something.]