review: THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN

This Train Ride Is Deathly Boring. Derailed!

2 stars

Mini Review:

While Gone Girl brings a visceral reaction from deep within you, The Girl On The Train just makes you think you’re on the wrong train and you check that ticket more than once. With only six characters and no reference to a one-armed man (like in The Fugitive), the suspense is as good as pie in your face. By the time the train reaches its destination, you wish you were as drunk as Emily Blunt is.

Main Review:

As the name suggests, Emily Blunt plays The Girl On The Train. The pictures on the poster show a forlorn face at the train window. Forlorn is what you feel when you realise that the whole premise is wrong.

That’s vodka, not water in her water bottle. And they tell us she’s been like this for a couple of years now. Woah! If one was that drunk, one would not be able to look at anyone in the train, let alone at the goings on in the houses where the train slows down.

Even when we put that logic aside, and believe that she hankers for a life that the seemingly perfect couple in ‘that’ house by the track, then we are told that the perfect couple live a couple of houses down from her previous home!

Then you realise that you fell asleep when reading the book. Comparisons with Gone Girl are inevitable because the story falls in the same genre. But It takes all of Emily Blunt’s acting prowess to keep the audiences interested. But you wouldn’t be human if you wish she wasn’t sniffling so much or that her nose was less like Rudolph at Christmas.

Haley Bennett and Luke Evans play the perfect couple, and their life does look like an endless honeymoon (we never really see him leave for work, kiss his wife goodbye, eat apple pie… everything you think a man with a picture-book-perfect white-picket home would have!). Full marks for the director though, for making Luke Evans wear low slung track pants… A little bit of ogling helps the train go somewhere.

Rebecca Ferguson and Justin Theroux play the new wife and Emily Blunt’s ex-husband, another couple she seems to be stalking via phone messages and incessant calls. But their domestic life is so dull, you wonder why she bothers…

There are some awesome human moments like Emily Blunt trying to help by meeting the Shrink and how she attempts to make conversation with fellow commuters and fails… But the whole monologue style just adds to the chug-chug-chugging of the train, and you realise that it is going nowhere. For those who have never read any crime fiction the end comes as a surprise. But for the rest of us, there’s no one-armed man there. So, du-uh!


(this review appears on nowrunning dot com)