Bullet Train

The Midnight Express to Nowhere in Particular

There’s something inherently ridiculous—and therefore promising—about stuffing elite assassins into a place where they’re supposed to keep it down. I’ve always had a soft spot for contained action movies, for that feeling that the hallway or room matters as much as the people throwing punches in it. Maybe that goes back to wearing out a VHS of *Die Hard* and memorizing the layout of Nakatomi Plaza. Put a bunch of killers inside a steel tube racing across Japan at 200 miles per hour and the joke is already halfway written. David Leitch's *Bullet Train* understands that. Its problem is that it often can’t resist explaining the punchline long after we’ve already laughed.



Leitch’s stuntman roots are all over the movie. This is someone who used to absorb hits for Brad Pitt before co-directing *John Wick* and moving into hyper-stylized mayhem like *Atomic Blonde*. He knows action is physical first. A blow matters because of what it does to a body and because the room around that body can betray it. Adapting Kōtarō Isaka’s novel, he turns the Shinkansen into a toy box full of hazards: a water bottle, a venomous snake, a smart toilet with bad timing. The best parts of the film have the loose inventiveness of someone scanning a space and thinking, yes, that can hurt.

The standout sequence is still the quiet car, mostly because it commits so fully to the bit. Brad Pitt’s Ladybug—an unlucky operative trying very hard to become a calmer person—ends up locked in a brutal fight with Brian Tyree Henry while furious passengers keep shushing them. So they apologize, drop their voices to whisper-level hostility, and go straight back to trying to strangle one another with a necktie. It’s wonderful. The whole scene carries that Jackie Chan sense that physical desperation can also be funny if you block it right.



Pitt is especially fun in this late-career mode he’s found, where movie-star vanity gives way to extremely handsome idiot energy. Ladybug shuffles through the film in a bucket hat, muttering half-digested therapy language and wishing, sincerely, that nobody would make him fire a gun. He just wants the briefcase and the exit. Pitt plays him like a man who keeps stumbling into catastrophe five minutes before the school day ends: lots of dodging, wincing, and exhausted sighing.

The real pulse of the movie, though, comes from Henry and Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Lemon and Tangerine. They’re sharp-dressed British killers who argue with the familiarity of siblings or spouses, depending on the minute. Henry’s accent slips now and then, but his faith in Lemon’s *Thomas the Tank Engine* worldview is so committed and oddly sweet that it barely matters. The two of them make the world around them feel lived in. Even when they’re talking nonsense, it sounds like the kind of nonsense only long-time partners would know how to throw at each other.



That loose charm is exactly what the movie keeps interrupting. The Tarantino and Guy Ritchie fingerprints are obvious, and every new arrival comes with a splashy title card and a flashback that stops the film dead in its tracks. The first couple work. After that, it starts to feel like the movie is amusing itself more than moving. It is a little absurd that something set on one of the world’s fastest trains spends so much time slamming the brakes.

Mashable's Kristy Puchko said Leitch more or less "snatched Guy Ritchie's whole vibe," and that lands because the dialogue can get smug enough to smother the actual excitement. Whether that ruins the movie probably comes down to your tolerance for self-aware cool. I wouldn’t call *Bullet Train* elegant. But it is loud, gaudy, cheerfully overstuffed, and every now and then it delivers exactly what it promises: Brad Pitt taking a briefcase to the face while a movie star grin struggles to survive.