Another best-selling-novel turned movie, "Girl on the Train" has a couple of challenges that means that it remains a servicable thriller rather than an excellent one.The titular girl, played by Emily Blunt, is a depressed woman who watches her ex-husband and his new wife as she regularly catches the train into New York and back home again, and also their young neighbor and her husband (and the young neighbour's possible lover/shrink) - so depressed by her contrasting lonliness that she's a regular drinker and suffers from occasional blackouts. One night she sees the neighbor out and about and then blacks out ... and the next day, discovers the young neighbour has gone missing. And the police know that she was nearby and she doesn't know what she might have done...
The most recent model of this kinda thriller is Gone Girl, but that had a grand guignol glee that is sorely lacking here. This treats its situations fairly straight - while Blunt is a solid actresss (as are most of the supporting cast, including Alison Janney as the disbelieving detective, Rebecca Ferguson as the new wife and Laura Prepon as her flatmate), her character's moroseness does tend to drag a lot of the action of the film down for the first two-thirds or so. There's also a little bit of a perfuctoryness about how the plot resolves - Lisa Kudrow is literally cast as a minor character early on so she can return and be instantly recognisable when she provides exposition that resolves much of the plot; and once the audince has worked out who-dun-it, we then have to get a laborious flashback that shows what-they-did, which most of the audience should be ahead of already.
THere is some intriguing stuff in the setup (particularly the storytelling from three different women's perspectives) but that tends to boil away as the plot continues. So this has to be a "just okay" experience.
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