(This review is riddled with spoilers. Not that you’re likely to see this film. It spent only three weeks at the box office in spring 2019.) It does a great job of scene-setting an alien takeover of Earth from the vantage point of one neighborhood in Chicago. (As usual, the weather is sucky in the future and everyone’s clothes are dirty.) And John Goodman pulls the best going-out-with-a-bang move since Clint Eastwood in “Gran Torino.” Unfortunately, “Captive State” comes off as less a movie than a pilot for a Syfy Original Series. You know, “this is only the beginning.” Whatever.
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Why is it I’m so happy “The Commuter” (2018) didn’t suck? Because I was afraid it’d be a lame, Taken-on-a-train knockoff? It kinda was (family in jeopardy, cellphones, ugh), but it also incorporated Hitchcock, “Duel” and every other halfway decent action movie involving trains. And the Noo Yawk accents were good enough. And I’ll overlook small violations of the laws of train physics and the Action Movie Concussion Protocol. Because when everything’s seemingly either a sucky sequel, sucky comic book movie, sucky horror movie, or combination of the above, there’s something nice about a slightly-above-average Liam Neeson movie. Noble, even.
Can’t anybody give a speech in a movie? Not a monologue. A speech. Room full of people, notecards, PowerPoint, whatever. Make your point and step away. No! There’s the Speech 180, where Actor stops in the middle and instead speechifies about the moral epiphany which caused them to reject whatever they were originally speechifying about. Or the Raincheck, where Actor stops, silently epiphanizes and rushes off to their sweetie. I was really liking “Up in the Air” (2009) until George Clooney pulls a Raincheck. But sweetie shoots him down! Ha! It made me start liking the movie all over again.
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