Film

Bullet Train

In real life, the bullet train that makes up the almost singular set piece for this strange heist film can travel from Tokyo to Kyoto, Japan, in just under 140 minutes. In Bullet Train, the film’s measured pace takes almost as long at 126 minutes: starting with a slow simmer and ending with an explosive and comical set of tidy denouements in this mash-up of Murder on the Orient Express and Pulp Fiction. What was billed as a high-octane fusion of John Woo and Guy Ritchie styles becomes an over-the-top exploration on the power of karma and inevitability of fate. (Note: These idolized filmmakers mastered the poetry of violence and moral fairy tales better than Bullet Train’s director David Leitch, a past stuntman and helmer of other pop fare such as Atomic Blonde and Deadpool 2.) What works best here belongs to the Japanese novelist Kōtarō Isaka, whose book is the basis for the film’s screenplay adaptation and who created the central conflict about the chaos of the universe embodied in Brad Pitt’s main character: a middle-aged, frumpy, snatch-and-grab American mercenary known only by his alias, Ladybug. Pitt gives the film his all in a subdued performance that really does make you believe he’s working through his anger management issues with his therapist, Barry. Pitt’s unique charisma as one his generation’s most interesting actors is almost enough to make the quasi-action-kung-fu revenge parody work. When we meet the skillful thief in Tokyo, Ladybug is delicately making his way back onto the job scene after struggling with panic attacks and guilt over the violent nature of his work, which often puts him in moral quandaries and plagues him with a sense of chronic bad luck. He himself sums it up best after a bloody fistfight, pleading with his opponent sincerely, “Let this be a lesson in the toxicity of anger!” Ladybug’s journey back to field work is so fraught with self-reflection and doubt that he has a constant handler working him through logistics and personal issues in his earpiece, played by Sandra Bullock in a kind of gender-reversed Charlie Townsend. Their chemistry keeps the convention working all the way to the end, even if the rest of the multi-tiered plot develops in a barrage of banter that almost feels more at home in a David Mamet play than it does on screen. There is a revolving passenger-car-door of very cheeky and colorful criminals along the way, played entertainingly enough by a diverse ensemble of international actors and video-game-like characters, including a highly poisonous Snake on the Train, an inflatable mascot assassin named The Hornet, a Russian heiress with bigtime daddy issues, and some unexpected and famous faces in cameos of brief but memorable hilarity. Once you realize the film is a fable of increasingly outlandish tone, it can be enjoyed fully as a graphic novel come to life or a photo-realistic world of manga and anime (as long as you don’t mind Asian tropes being treated with the usual wasabiflavored fascination). If it feels like you’ve been here before, of course you have! You’ll recognize everything from the iconic silver briefcase to the sexualized woman with a gun to the black-leathered street gangs. But there are some snippets of new as well, especially in the circuitous way the film plays with luck and destiny, including that of inanimate objects like a Fiji water bottle. There are evolving double, triple, and quadruple crosses and betrayals as Bullet Train does genuinely pick up steam, even as characters (and sometimes the audience) feel trapped on the speeding train trying to follow alliances and loyalties changing hands faster than the landscape outside the windows. There is a lot of movie-making on display here and a pretty groovy soundtrack. And while it’s fun most of the trip to ride along with these zany, R-rated characters, it’s also not hard to get a little antsy waiting for the film’s last stop, when we can get off and find a Zen garden somewhere for a little peace and quiet...and then call Barry to check in.

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