Let’s just hope the lovable Brad Pitt doesn’t give us his lead swan song in this strangely exhausting and overwhelmingly unfunny gonzo-violent action comedy set on a Japanese bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto, with the frenetically hyper-paced pacing of the film in tribute to the speed of the locomotive. This movie would be a horrible way for Pitt’s acting career to hit the brakes, and he’s given lines like, “He follows me like…a witty thing.”
It’s a semi-westwashed version of the best-selling 2010 novel by Japanese author Kotoro Isaka and directed by David (Deadpool 2) Leitch, all about a gang of absurd killers on a train, their murderous destinies colliding chaotically, and as a result they have more to do with each other than they think.
With the shock pans and zooms, sudden flashbacks, voice-overs, stylized punches, gunshots and stabbings and inter-titles featuring the odd characters and geezer crimes (two of whom are cockneys and serious West Ham fans ), this is worryingly like something from Guy Ritchie. (Though Brad Pitt’s eccentric performance as a traveler in Ritchie’s Snatch is better than nothing here.)
Be on guard… Brian Tyree Henry and Brad Pitt in Bullet Train. Photo: Sony/Scott Garfield/Allstar
Pitt himself, in a goofy bucket hat, nerdy glasses, and over-the-top surfer gear, plays a laid-back hitman codenamed “Ladybug” whose handler (Sandra Bullock) gives him an easy job, to make it easier for him to new to the game after a series of tumultuous calamities. in previous missions.
All he has to do is grab a briefcase stuffed with cash that belongs to two other hitmen: Tangerine (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Lemon (Brian Tyree Henry), who have just rescued the son of a known mobster from a kidnapping and this money is the ransom they didn’t have to pay. Both speak in Laarndaarn accents, and Lemon has an obsession with, of all things wacky, Thomas the Tank Engine — an elaborate but shallow character touch that’s about 47% as funny and well-observed as it needed to be.
Meanwhile, there’s another bloodthirsty Brit on board, codenamed Prince: a psychopathic high school student played by Joey Prince, who’s tried to kill the young son of another passenger, the Japanese assassin Kimura ( Andrew Koji) and maintains a sinister grip on him, but he may Still, you have to count Kimura’s own father, known as the Elder, in which veteran player Hiroyuki Sanada comes closest to anyone else in the cast to be really great.
There is another killer on the train called the Wolf (Benito A Martinez Ocasio) with a grudge against Ladybug, another named the Hornet (Zazie Beetz) and towering over everyone in legendary evil is the White Death ( Michael Shannon) waiting on the Kyoto platform.
It sounds intense over and over and over again with unexciting fights and uninteresting choreography, cameos that briefly surface interest, and placeholder non-lines where the fun stuff should have gone. Pitt’s good puppy nature keeps it from being completely over, but it’s nothing like the script and direction he got from Soderbergh, Tarantino, or Fincher. And the Japanese setting is handled very superficially; there are gags about Japanese toilets that should have come out in the 1980s. This is a tourist trip to nowhere.
Bullet Train hits theaters on August 3 in the UK, August 4 in Australia and August 5 in the US.