THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN

THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN 

THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN: C- 

Watching it with Nicole Smith, Joel Straube andAshley Bunting, we actually didn't finish it. It quit on us with about 8-10 minutes left and we never could get it to work again on the Amazon Firestick. So perhaps the last 10 minutes or so would change my overall grade. Not sure.

It was a well directed movie and I can't complain about how it was written. I simply didn't like the story and none of the characters interested me. I look for redeeming qualities in people and I had a hard time finding them in the characters. I felt bad for Rachel, and I liked her more than I did the other characters of the film, but I still didn't care much for her either.

I also felt the movie tried to come off as far more clever than it was. To me a well done movie is when it gives you everything you need to know, and you still have difficultly figuring things out. Then upon revelation you slap yourself in the head and say, "I should have seen that" even though you didn't. This film instead gives you nothing and then feels clever that you might not have guessed. I did guess though. I had a feeling that the film wasn't wanting to be obvious and that only left one direction the film could have went. I'll admit I made two guesses as to who did it. I actually thought as bizarre and f'd up as the film wanted to come off as, that my first guess would be correct. It wasn't. My second guess however was.

Not my type of film, or perhaps maybe I do like films like these sometimes with characters that I can invest in. At the end of the movie I did find some satisfaction with someone getting what they deserved.

So in a rare case I'll say that overall, the acting, the directing, the cinematography, and even the score fit the film well. Even the story, although a bit misdirected in trying to hard to be suspenseful and clever was quite decent.

I simply didn't care for it, the overall message it was sending or the characters involved. Felt like a horror film where I can't have fun with it, because I find myself disliking the victims even more than I do the killer. Not quite the case here, but close.