Mark Reviews Movies: BULLET TRAIN

Bullet Train, Sony Pictures Releasing

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 4, 2022

A character in Bullet Train criticizes modern media for being filled with "twists, violence, and drama" but forgoing any kind of message. It's meant to be ironic, because here's a guy who cares about the morals of stories who exists within a story that's all about its multiple twists and surges of bloody violence.

It's doubly ironic, because the character who makes the critique is far from a moral man. Like so many others in this tale, he's a professional assassin, who breaks the fourth wall during a flashback to count the number of people he and his partner killed during a recent job. All of this is probably intended to be triply ironic, since Zak Olkewicz's screenplay (based on a novel Kōtarō Isaka) does have something of a message about fate and seemingly bad people being rewarded for not being quite as bad as others.

That's a stretch, of course, but that also makes it almost certain that director David Leitch is attempting that final level of supposed meaning. The whole movie is one big stretch of character, plot, believability, irony, and intention.

The setup is simple, in that it finds a professional killer/snatcher-and-grabber codenamed Ladybug (Brad Pitt), who is trying to reform by way of therapy, assigned to steal a briefcase from bullet train making its way from Tokyo to Kyoto. The job seems to go off without a hitch, since Ladybug, who's usually—and soon enough—plagued by bad luck, finds the case almost immediately. Since Olkewicz introduces us to several other characters and begins the story with a seemingly unrelated subplot about a man trying to avenge the attempted murder of his young son, none of this, obviously, will be as simple as that.

Those other characters include hitmen Lemon (Brian Tyree Henry)—the one who talks about messages in stories, using a TV show for kids as his guide—and Tangerine (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who are in possession of the briefcase and a different son (played by Logan Lerman, in the first of many, many credited and uncredited cameos that make up some the real and really frustrating surprises of this movie). They saved this adult child of a ruthless gangster from another gang that had abducted him, and for reasons that aren't explained until the third act, the briefcase Ladybug is tasked to steal contains the ransom money.

In other parts of the train are the Prince (Joey King), a young woman whose feigned innocence hides a sinister personality, and Kimura (Andrew Koji), the father of the young boy who was shoved from a rooftop. As it turns out, the Prince did try to kill the son, and she has a plan for the father, which, again, isn't revealed until much later.

These characters eventually and continually collide on the train, since they all want the briefcase for different reasons. That's an excuse for the movie's multiple action scenes, which have Ladybug taking on Lemon, Tangerine, a Mexican hitman named the Wolf (Benito A Martínez Ocasio), another professional assassin who uses poison (a terrible waste of a fine actress in a throwaway cameo), and a venomous snake that's slithering around the compartments. The brawls are staged well enough, save for some unfortunate close-ups and shoddy editing that undermine the choreography, but it's difficult to find a reason to care about the fights when so many characters are immediately disposable—or just more broadly so, since their existence in exclusively in service of the plotting.

Those characters, who are interconnected by the big-time gangster (another waste of some inspired casting, although it's at least slightly more than a cameo), get some back story. The Wolf's motivation for randomly showing up on the train is detailed in a lengthy montage, which occurs after he has departed from the story—rendering it meaningless. There's a quick flashback to Lemon and Tangerine as kids, giving some truth to the running joke that they're supposedly twins but really just highlighting the constant tonal clash between the movie's too-cool irony and its attempts at sincerity. Indeed, Olkewicz and Leitch give about as much consideration to the path of a water bottle, as it's purchased at the station and finally has a key part to play in the climax, as they do some of these characters.

The cast is having some fun, with Pitt being a steady hoot as the self-aware criminal, King showing some devious confidence, Henry and Taylor-Johnson bickering with aplomb, Koji and Hiroyuki Sanada playing the straight men amongst the shenanigans, and all of those cameos clearly happy to be receiving a paycheck, at least. At its core, though, Bullet Train is an empty display of posturing that's a bit too smug about its thin shell of artifice.

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