Review- The Girl on the Train

The Girl on the Train is the film based on that book that person you knew probably read and thought it was quite good although could sometimes be a bit much but my, it was rather gripping. It's also the story of a woman who stares at a seemingly perfect couple from the window of her train but decides to get involved when something goes wrong. She's also a divorced alcoholic. The plot of this film has been compared to Gone Girl and I will come back to that later but it isn't as smart as Gone Girl. It is generic thriller territory and I worked out who dun it pretty quickly which ruined the tension. The narrative turns that films like this are so often dependent on are weak to non-existent so don't expect a totally riveting narrative. Overall, it's a decent story but nowhere close to as good as it should be.

Acting is a mixed bag in the film but probably the highlight. The obvious highlight is Emily Blunt in the lead. She is good enough and portrays a broken woman well but in the year after Sicario, good at playing a broken woman isn't really good enough. The supporting cast had, in general, decent performances as characters whose names I have already forgotten. There was Rebecca Ferguson from Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation playing a woman who had to look scared a lot and she was fine. There was some attractive lady who I haven't seen in anything else playing the lady who is missing and slightly unpredictable and she was less okay but still good in places. Luke Evans and Justin Theroux are husbands and you will quickly work out their roles by how suspicious they act all the time. It's a cast of talented people giving performances that are enough.

It would have been nice hear to talk about how nice the cinematography was or the score that's pretty good but instead, I am forced to talk about the god awful pacing. Typically, you like your thrillers to have breakneck speed so that you're shocked by each of the many revelations without the time to consider that some of them may be a little stupid. This film forgets that and instead, there is a little bit of speed for the last ten minutes and then nothing. It is painfully slow and it takes until about halfway into the film for the event you're expecting to happen to actually happen. Little actually comes of it so you just kind of spend time twiddling your thumbs, waiting for that revelation and hoping it will be a more interesting one than the last. With a couple of exceptions, it's not going to happen.

So basically, for a film that wanted to be Gone Girl, we got a film that just wasn't there. I'm sure that it actually works well as a book but I feel like having now seen the plot play out, I can't enjoy that so the film has ruined that too. I know I've been overly acknowledging the bad, the film is kind of okay but it's really held back by some elements. I wouldn't really recommend seeing the film but it's alright and gets a