Movie Reviews: Girl on the Train, War on Everyone, Mattress Men

Emily Blunt stars as the eponymous heroine of The Girl on the Train (15A), although ‘heroine’ is stretching it a bit — Rachel is an alcoholic divorcée, a voyeur who stalks her husband Tom (Justin Theroux), craving the life he has built with his new wife Anna (Rebecca Ferguson) in their old home. 

On her daily commute into the city on a train that passes through their old neighbourhood, Rachel fantasizes about the perfect lives of Tom, Anna and their nanny Megan (Haley Bennett).

Then Megan goes missing, and Rachel realises a crucial detail about Megan’s disappearance lurks somewhere in the depths of her booze-sodden memory.

Adapted by Erin Cressida Wilson from the phenomenal bestseller by Paula Hawkins, the story is in its bare bones a conventional thriller: an amateur sleuth stumbles into a mystery armed with information that ensures only she can solve it.

What makes this one of the most absorbing thrillers since Mystic River (2003), however, is its emotional power, much of which can be attributed to a superbly nuanced performance from Emily Blunt in the central role.

Rachel is a brittle and flawed inversion of the usual heroic tropes, a normal woman struggling (and mostly failing) to cope with a life that has crashed and burned, and her desperate attempt to regain her sense of dignity and worth is the prism through which the mystery unfolds.

Brilliantly plotted, with director Tate Taylor expertly weaving together a number of sub-plots, The Girl on the Train is a gripping thriller of depth and subtlety that may well herald the advent of a new kind of Hollywood heroine.

War on Everyone (16s) stars Alexander Skarsgård and Michael Peña as Terry and Bob, two New Mexico cops ‘from hell’.

Casually brutal, Terry and Bob are cops for whom the detective shield is a flag of convenience that allows them carte blanche in their approach to fighting crime: “You can shoot people for no reason and no one can do a damn thing about it.”

Worse, the duo are utterly corrupt, chasing criminals not to bring them to justice, but to shake them down for bribes and backhanders.

Their latest scheme involves targeting the elaborate scam hatched by Lord James Mangan (Theo James), but are Terry and Bob about to bite off more than even these Rottweilers can chew?

Written and directed by John Michael McDonagh (The Guard, Calvary), War on Everyone is a blackly comic parody of the buddy-buddy cop movie, with the characters firing off pithy one-liners designed (it seems) to insult virtually every culture, nation and minority group on the planet.

Although it’s laugh-out-loud funny in places, the story quickly begins to drag given the sketchy plot and crude characterisations — had McDonagh chosen to focus on a particular plot strand or theme (the hot-button topic of racial profiling by police, for example, which recurs on a number of occasions), War on Everyone would have been a much more cohesive offering, even if it might have needed a new title.

Peña and Skarsgård are as charismatic as they are repellent in the lead roles (they’re a bolshier version of Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling in The Nice Guys), but for the most part War on Everyone is a Tarantino-lite tale that sabotages itself in its eagerness to cause offence.

Mattress Men (15A) is a documentary about YouTube sensation ‘Mattress Mick’, aka Michael Flynn, the Dublin-based mattress retailer who rejuvenated his ailing business through unlocking the potential of social media.

The focus of Colm Quinn’s film, however, is Paul Kelly, the mastermind behind the Mattress Mick videos that went viral — heavily in debt, desperate to get off the dole, and struggling to maintain his relationships with his wife and children, Paul is a real-life character straight from the pages of Charles Dickens.

It sounds like an offbeat, quirky tale, and there is plenty of humour here — the ‘Mattress Mick’ viral video features a DeLorean and a Back to the Future theme, and the documentary is spliced with scenes of Brian Traynor, dressed as a mattress, wandering the streets of Dublin — but Mattress Men is an important social documentary, a penetrating and heart-breaking account of life in post-recession Ireland.

Moreover, there’s a universal message here: Paul’s experience is essentially a struggle for basic human rights and needs, and it’s one conducted with uncommon dignity.

Irish documentary-making is going through something of a purple patch at the moment, and Colm Quinn’s feature-length debut is one of the finest examples of the genre.

The Girl on the Train 5/5

War on Everyone 3/5

Mattress Men 4/5