Exhaustingly Excessive Actioner ‘BULLET TRAIN’ is Pure Joyless Destruction

Snakes On a Train

The scourge that is the 2022 summer movie season continues with the loud, ultra-violent, and ultimately entirely mindless Bullet Train. Best known for the John Wick franchise, Deadpool 2, and the Fast and Furious spin-off Hobbs and Shaw, writer-director David Leitch is a creator of quickly diminishing returns. Here, he delivers an algorithmic Guy Ritchie wanna-be crime whodunnit packed with movie stars and the popular “gun-fu” combat style the former stunt man helped pioneer but short on actual plot locomotion and charm. All set on a train! It’s not an entirely feckless ride, the game performances are just enough to power the film forward and keep the groans to a minimum, but it’s as disposable as it is bloated with wanton destruction. For a movie this unconcerned with logical collateral fallout, one that childishly gawks at violence, it sure does have a strange amount of references to Thomas the Tank Engine.

Brad Pitt leads the overpacked ensemble as codename Lady Bug. He’s one of five assassins who finds himself on an overnight Kyoto-bound bullet train on what should be a straightforward mission: snatch a suitcase filled with ten million dollars in ransom money from a criminal overlord. Though the unlucky Lady Bug has tried to turn a corner in his career of crime and settle into the Zen of Thug Life, his latest assignment has a would-be snatch and grab turned upside down. Bodies begin to pile up. Double crosses turn to triple crosses. As the juvenile script throws an increasing number of spanners into the works, things get convoluted, more killers enter to the fray, and the plot thickens into a muddy, spastic goop.

Playing out like a mash-up of Knives Out, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and John Wick, Bullet Train is a noisy, headache-inducing mishmash of tones and genres that lets down a capable cast doing their best to make the over-written, under-thought-through material work. To say that it’s less than the sum of its parts is to overstate the quality of said parts. Leitch’s over-the-top, maximalist approach often doesn’t even square with the material. Adapted from Kōtarō Isaka’s darkly comic thriller of the same name, Bullet Train is much too hyped up on Leitch’s singular version of neon-colored cinematic excess to coalesce into a coherent whole.

The tone pivots from good-humored to angry from scene to scene; characters try to murder one another in one scene, become allies in the next, then are back at each other’s throats again; characters sometimes work alongside people who betrayed them just moments earlier. Its internal logic fails because these characters and the world they populate just don’t make register as remotely real. What may have proved hyper-kinetic action in book form instead is destined to grate, annoy any viewer whose already completed puberty.

This applies to the actual setting as well. What could have been an interesting single-location setting turns into more opportunity for inconsistency. Throughout Bullet Train, various train cars will be jammed full of bystanders and then mysteriously empty moments later. One scene that’s set in a “quiet hours” car has combatants engaging in hushed fisticuffs, getting shushed. Moments later they’re screaming and firing off rounds in the same car. For whatever reason, there is never any reaction to the fact that people are being killed left and right throughout the train, or when characters waltz about drenched in blood.

The action itself is often an over-edited mess, which is a surprise coming from Leitch. Gone is the stunt -focused, cleverly-edited stunt choreography that defined his early work, which one might have reasonably assumed would be on full display in these tight quartered settings. Instead most of the actual fight work is hacked away with editing, filtered through CGI, and lacking the inventive, well-staged, long shots you expect from a Leitch creation. To stage great action is a chore and involves endless hours of stunt rehearsals and even more time staging the shots. To do the same work in post-production is just easier – though it invariably looks worse. With Bullet Train, Leitch has opted for the road most traveled. The result? Muddy, frantic action with hardly a memorable one-shot action scene in sight.

The cast remains admirably game despite the scripts’ many shortcomings. Featuring a who’s who of established and up-and-coming talent, Bullet Train boasts an ensemble that includes Joey King, Aaron Taylor Johnson, Brian Tyree Henry, Andrew Koji, Hiroyuki Sanada, Michael Shannon, Logan German, Bad Bunny, Zazie Beetzm and Sandra Bullock. There’s also a few A-list cameos presented as a consolation for otherwise poor storytelling.

Much like Pulp Fiction spawned a generation of copycat filmmakers, Leitch has almost begun to parody himself. Finding the balance between dazzling action and pithy humor escapes the creator on more than one instance, this latest film a continuation of the maximalist nonsense that has come to define his works. Not that anyone expects subtlety or even restraint from Leitch, but his works have become such winky meta content bombs that they’re hard to even disgust at face value. The end product just feels like it’s trying to hard to be cool, edgy, or irreverently funny that it fails to take on any shape beyond the excess. In a fit of pubescent machismo, Bullet Train instead arrives so far detached from anything resembling recognizable reality that it’s impossible to care whether it goes up in flames or not.

CONCLUSION: David Leitch’s cartoonish adaptation of ‘Bullet Train‘ is a loud, violent, messy action-thriller that borrows liberally from a handful of movie genres – thriller, actioner, whodunnit, crime drama – to decidedly annoying effect. The capable cast is far and away the film’s best feature though the action under Leitch’s command is disappointing lacking in creativity.