Bullet Train movie review: Brad Pitt adds charm to a lackluster movie

With all the cash and brawn behind them, you’d think keeping an eye on their kids must be easy for crime lords. In Bullet Train, that’s the only thing that doesn’t work. Even as gang lords whose reputations precede them around the world, from Japan to America, juggle an incomprehensible plan to pack up to five assassins aboard this shinkansen, their children seem to go unnoticed around them.

Which is the cause of a lot of chaos in this movie, based on a Japanese bestseller called Maria Beetle. Once he got an English translation, the idea of ​​putting Brad Pitt on a high-speed train and exploding both of them – with damage to only one, and no prizes for guessing which one – was probably too good. to let her pass. And here he is, at full speed.

You really don’t need to know the plot. As one character says to another, even if you half-expect someone to understand how things are connected: “You work for somebody, he works for somebody…etc etc. Few matters anyway.” The only thing that matters, we are told over and over again, is a dangerous man called “the white death”, who is waiting to get his son and his money back every time this shipwreck stops.

The White Death, yes, because it is “like the plague”. And conveniently Russian.

Forget it and almost every individual character, killer or not, is interesting. Needless to say, these are the non-Japanese parts. Tiptoeing around political correctness, Hollywood isn’t making Japanese villains yet, no sir. Unlike our debauched and therefore stylish Hollywood villains, there’s Honor and some Japanese Bullet Train cohorts still up the ante (including the notable Sanada).

You might be wondering how a train from Tokyo to Kyoto could have carried so many foreigners in one trip, without raising a few eyebrows. But you are asking the wrong question here. The local train passengers seem to notice nothing of what is happening, not even superficially, and are literally just props in this drama.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson is good as Tangerine, one half of a team that goes by the nickname The Twins. Brian Tyree Henry is better than his Thomas the Tank Engine fan partner Lemon. The scene stealer is Joey King as this young girl with secrets to hide and killer moves, all in a pink uniform inspired by those schoolgirl skirts. Japanese men are so partial too.

But it’s a Pitt movie, and let there be no illusions about it. He’s an assassin in therapy, so he avoids guns and, in his mind, avoids killing as much as possible. Of course, this cannot be avoided. Pitt’s nickname “Ladybug” could be about delusion, karma, good thoughts, etc., but he never loses sight of the fact that he must survive first and foremost. With director Leitch (Deadpool 2, Atomic Blonde), we’ve already learned that no blood spatter is too much.

An image from Bullet Train.

Aware of its charm, and playing for laughs, pitt illuminates the movie whenever it is on screen. He’s a star who embraces his age, and the reading glasses he now needs, and the therapist whose pithy platitudes he took, but he’s a star indeed. Which means his aging eyes might only be human like the rest of us, but his unbreakable body isn’t, and the bullet train, with its dizzying array of cars, doesn’t stand a chance.

There’s been some tsk-tsk about Hollywood being Hollywood and not putting its real money where its mouth says diversity casting, in a Japan shoot and its famous bullet trains, but Pitt makes it all easy.

He has the endorsement, in addition to the original best-selling author Maria Beetle. “I have no desire for people to understand Japanese literature or culture,” Kotara Isaka told The New York Times. “It’s not like I understand much about Japan either.”

As refreshing as that statement is, the film is hardly so. We saw this train leaving the station.