I have a number of problems with this film, number one being why it is even called L'Homme du Train (The Man on the Train)? The man is only on the train for thirty seconds during the opening credits. After that trains play no further part in the film. Uh?
<*dv_1*> Ageing criminal Milan (Johnny Halliday) arrives in sleepy French backwater to pull off a bank job in three days time. Through a chance meeting he ends up staying with a talkative retired teacher. Slowly, and believe me it is slow, a relationship builds up between the two men as they each recognise qualities in each other which make them regret aspects of their own lives.
It is an amiable and almost likeable story, however The Man on the Train is derailed by its appalling fantasy sequence ending. All the work to carefully craft the relationship between the two men is undone as the director does not seem to really know what the point of the journey was.
<*dv_3*> You are left feeling as if the previous however many minutes were all for nothing as the film ends without really finishing the story. The director tries to cover for this with a dire silent fantasy sequence laden with such heavy handed symbolism that it would have been subtler if they had just run an explanation in the subtitles.
If you really want to try out a Train titled film then you would be better off with any of the following; Planes, Trains and Automobiles hilarious though not without several extremely sickly sentimental moments, the Kurosawa scripted nihilism of Runaway Train even has half a prison movie thrown in aswell, The Train with Burt Lancaster does take awhile to get rolling but generates a full head of steam or the Czech classic Closely Observed Trains which is funny, tender, thrilling and a cold war political satire to boot.
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