Tate Taylor’s, ‘The Girl On The Train’, renders me with an extremely mixed response. After watching the film about three days ago, I have struggled to come to the conclusion as to whether I actually enjoyed it or not. This naturally brought up a few red flags as I thoroughly enjoyed the book but couldn’t help feeling a sense of slight disappointment with the outcome in movie form.
The film, based on straight entertainment value, is quite the mess, the beginning seems to be a wreckless jumble of the different characters narrative strings that just don’t seem to add up, or tie together. It is clear to see that Erin Cressida Wilson, who was hired to write the screenplay struggled to tackle the task of dealing with the adaptation. The film constantly jumps back and forth in time, something that worked well in the book (written by Paula Hawkins), but is simply confusing for the audience to follow in the film version. No doubt Wilson did the best she could, dealing with such a challenging book couldn’t have been easy and by no means could I have done any better but, nevertheless it has to be said that right up until the final revealing moments of the film, I was embarrassingly confused with what was going on.
I also couldn’t help but feel The Train was in the shadow of Flincher’s success that was Gone Girl. The film attempted to possess the same eerie tone as the 2014 mystery/drama but seemed to lack the depth of the twists and character achieved by Flincher. Even the reveal of the ‘whodunnit’ moment and reruns of Rachel’s (Emily Blunt) drunken nights showing the true events of her marriage with Tom (Justin Theroux) came with no WOW factor or shock due to the unsurprising delivery that simply confirm the audiences most obvious suspicions and predictions. Moreover, with its obvious inspirations taken from Hitchcock’s Rear View, it had a lot to live up to and unfortunately it failed to hit the mark in every department – but what do you expect, Hitchcock’s masterpieces can not be replicated and The Train made no exception to this.
However, the film was never boring. In fact with all the time travelling and drunken scenes, it’s actually rather entertaining and requires, without a doubt, a serious measure of concentration. The film plays deeply into typical stereotypes, that don’t appear to be so obvious in the book, making it hard to relate to characters or even like them – the crazy ex-wife, the controlling ex-husband, the haughty new wife and the naive mistress. Whilst the characters aren’t by any means terrible, it does make the plot all the more predictable and the character of Tom so easily becomes the prime culprit.
Moreover, it can’t go without mentioning Emily Blunt’s strong performance of her character Rachel Watson. We do definitely feel for the protagonist due to her sympathetic performance, almost to the point of frustration at the fact she gets herself into such a state. But, Blunt’s convincing performance is no where near enough to carry the film alone and at best, the film was a very watchable thriller, with very unlikeable characters, that lacked substance. It wasn’t exactly a train wreck but it was no luxury ride either.
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