What do you call a high-speed Japanese train full of assassins with guns (and bullets)? A bullet train. Yuk-yuk.
What Happens on the Bullet Train
The 2010 novel “Maria Beetle” by Kotaro Isaka provides the following premise: Brad Pitt plays a mercenary, call-sign “Ladybug” (for good luck, maybe?), hired to facilitate various types of shady outcomes. In other words, he’s an assassin, but we meet him as he’s rejoining the fray following a stint of therapy and, you know, finding himself, and so Pitt plays Ladybug sort of like a puppy that chewed up a couple of self-help books: He occasionally coughs up bland tidbits of personal growth wisdom.
His first job back is supposed to be easy; just abscond with a metal briefcase on a Kyoto-bound bullet train. But despite his lucky code name, our Ladybug is not lucky; turns out the whole train is packed with deadly mercenaries, armed to the teeth with firearms, swords, poisons, and even grudges. None of them get along. It’s supposed to be funny, and Tarantino-esque, but it’s just not.
Assassin List
The foremost featured train assassins are a cockney-accented British team of two: Lemon (Brian Tyree Henry) and Tangerine (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). The actually British Taylor-Johnson wears dapper suits with a ‘70’s ‘stache, looking like he wandered in from the set of the “Kingsman” movies. The American Henry rocks a silver-frosted ’fro and has a curious weltanschauung; he interprets the world via the children’s book series “Thomas the Tank Engine,” using it as a sort of alternative Tarot card or zodiac system, whereby a person’s personality traits can be revealed. He likes to press little decals of the various types of trains on people’s faces to label them.
Next up is Prince (Joey King), a schoolgirl who just might be an innocent bystander. But as we know from Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill: Volume 1,” you just can’t allow yourself to trust schoolgirls; they’re very dangerous. There’s also Wolf (Benito A Martinez Ocasio also known as Bad Bunny), a heartbroken hitman looking for revenge.
Should You Buy a Ticket to This Movie?
Um, no. This film will put you into a glassy-eyed stupor via cloddish plotting, wannabe Tarantino hit-man dialog. Lemon and Tangerine are sort of a poor man’s version of hit-men Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) and Vincent (John Travolta) in “Pulp Fiction” and their mundane discussions about things like McDonald’s quarter pounders with cheese between hits.
Inventive instances of close-quarters hand-to-hand combat on public transportation abound. But if all the fighting takes place in a train carriage, there are only so many combinations and permutations of surprising situations you can come up with, no matter how many katana swords and pit vipers you throw in there to spice things up. Remember “Snakes on a Plane?” This is snakes on a train.
Lastly, tonally “Bullet Train” is as smugly pleased with itself as Napoleon Dynamite wearing his sweet brown suit and moon boots to the prom, and the main reason for this cloying self-satisfaction is Pitt. There might just be a school of thought out there that would argue that Pitt is the film’s raison d‘être. There’s not really any time, ever, that Brad Pitt has not been likeable, but he’s also definitely to blame for this mess. His celebrity, and especially his coming off a turn as a bodyguard who beats up Bruce Lee in Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” is what gave this project the green light in the first place. You’d think, with his sense of integrity, being onboard “Bullet Train” would have upped the quality control, but not even the presence of action master Antoine Fuqua, here in a producer capacity, could keep “Bullet Train” from going off the rails.
Which is somehow crazy. Because in addition to quality powerhouses Pitt and Fuqua, you’ve got David Leitch, the director, a veteran stunt coordinator. Leitch’s work on the original “John Wick” and “Atomic Blonde” would lead one to believe that “Bullet Train” could be similarly kinetic, but no. Whenever fights happen, the film will dilute it with another flaccid joke, so each battle ends up being more about hollow slapstick than well-crafted stunts, with none of it memorable.
It’s supposed to be Tarantino-esque, and cute, and Antoine Fuqua-riveting-action-y, and hilarious, but it’s just none of the above.
Miss this train.
