If you've read Paula Hawkins's bestselling thriller The Girl on the Train you'll know what's going to happen in the film adaptation. However, director Tate Taylor and scriptwriter Erin Cressida Wilson have done the book a disservice by reducing the number of characters and making it too easy by simple deduction to figure out early on who did it.The twisting satisfactions of Hawkins's book are discarded in favour of playing it dull and safe. The potential to bring to life the underlying motivations of the story's characters and visually reflect the nastiness at its heart is largely ignored.Drunk, lonely, unreliable narrator Rachel (Emily Blunt) travels daily on the train to New York. There she sits in the same seat waiting to catch a glimpse of the seemingly idyllic moments in the apparently perfect lives of Megan (Haley Bennett) and Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), who she sees from the train window as she passes. Rachel has reason to be a little obsessed with Anna, who is the mother of the child of Rachel's ex-husband, Tom (Justin Theroux).When Megan goes missing Rachel becomes fixated on finding out what happened to her, and gradually details of all three women's lives and the connections between them are revealed. Beyond the apparently perfect glimpses flashing past the train windows is a trite tale of betrayal and the ugliness of human nature.Taylor, who directed the saccharine race relations drama The Help, is no David Fincher. He is unable to bring the psychological darkness needed to make the film work as a disturbing tale of suburban marriage gone wrong, in the vein of Fincher's Gone Girl.While Blunt gives a strong and believably shifting psychological nuance to her portrayal of Rachel, she's not able to make the whole experience as intriguing is it needs to be. Bennett and Ferguson are given little room to manoeuvre beyond their stereotyped Madonna/whore cutouts and creepy Justin Theroux just plays creepy Justin Theroux.It's all too conventional and by the time the melodramatic finale arrives it's hard not to laugh at its sheer ludicrousness - though it might make you look at your kitchen corkscrew in a new light.If this is a train ride, it's a stop-and-start affair with an hour's delay for track maintenance in the middle of nowhere.WHAT OTHERS SAYUpscale psychodramatic confessional bad-behaviour porn, it generates a voyeuristic zing that’s sure to carry audiences along. — Owen Gleiberman, Variety Sadly this mystery fails to intrigue. — Jonathan Pile, Empire..