Bullet Train: Death Goes Off the Rails in a Blaze of Self-Conscious Tarantino/Ritchie-esque Irony

By Jim Slotek

Rating: C

There’s something anachronistic about Bullet Train, the derivatively tongue-in-cheek action film in which operative Brad Pitt and a group of assassins stumble around killing each other on Japanese high speed rail.

It reminds me of the impact Quentin Tarantino had in the ‘90s, inspiring hordes of lesser filmmakers with the simplistic notion that grotesque and gratuitous violence becomes ironic if you approach it in a detached manner, with wisecracks and maybe a cheesy old hit song or two. (In Bullet Train, listen for Kyu Sakamoto’s international ‘60s hit Sukiyaki, and a Japanese version of Holding Out For a Hero from Footloose).

Tangerine (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Ladybug (Brad Pitt) work out their differences in Bullet Train

To be sure, that approach extended forward, to the gangster films of Guy Ritchie and the exercise in Marvel-based self-parody, Deadpool. No surprise that Bullet Train director David Leitch also directed Deadpool 2.

But it has its limits, especially when there’s no “there” there, and the wisecracks and deliberately inane banter are ham-fisted and worth about three chuckles in a two-hour movie (you may never want to hear the words Thomas the Tank Engine again).

Perhaps mindful of the Oscar he won for Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, Pitt is once again the “chill guy” in a parade of the excited, panicky and murderous. When we meet him, he is codenamed “Ladybug.” It seems to be a running gag to give male operatives cute female-sounding names – with two key killers, brothers named Lemon (Brian Tyree Henry) and Tangerine (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Conversely, one young female killer (Joey King) is called The Prince.

Taken from the book by Kôtarô Isaka, it’s hard to say what, if anything, got lost in translation. The bullet train of the title is soon on route from Tokyo to Kyoto, full of hit-persons, plus a couple of MacGuffins in the form of a briefcase with $10 million in it, and one of the world’s most venomous snakes, stolen from a zoo and now slithering about under the seats ready to randomly affect the plot.

Besides Ladybug, Lemon and Tangerine, there’s The Wolf (Bad Bunny) and The Hornet (Zazie Beetz), though some are dispatched almost as quickly as they are introduced. I was going to say “as quickly as we get to know them,” but we don’t really get to know anybody here. Though we do get that Ladybug is going through a career crisis, and his analysis sessions have turned him into a New Age affirmation machine, like a criminal Ted Lasso.

All are somehow entwined with The White Death, a Russian-born king of the Japanese underworld, who is waiting for the train at Kyoto, ostensibly to receive his son (Logan Lerman) alive and the aforementioned briefcase, which are to be delivered by Lemon and Tangerine. For his part, Ladybug has been hired to steal the briefcase. Everybody else in the movie, it seems, is motivated by revenge against one of the others.

In real time and in slaughter-filled flashbacks, blood spurts, people are shot, decapitated and poisoned (if your eyes bleed, you’ve been poisoned). In between, there are a couple of extraneous celebrity cameos meant mainly to get a reaction from the audience.

It’s a mess of a plot and a literal trainwreck of a denouement. No faulting the destruction scenes, since they’re in Leitch’s wheelhouse, and as they say, every dollar is on the screen in that regard.

But to paraphrase a quote from the late character actor Edmund Gwenn, killing is easy, comedy is hard.

Bullet Train. Directed by David Leitch. Starring Brad Pitt, Joey King and Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Opens in theatres Friday, August 5.