The latest David Leitch punch-em-up is not a particularly good film. It's a cartoonish action pastiche where a bunch of colorful, lethal characters are all stuck together on a Japanese bullet train, and not by accident. It's not original. Despite the star-studded cast, it's not especially well written or well executed. There's too much gravity-defying CGI, and the action is aggressively okay. In some respects, the movie is downright sloppy. However, "Bullet Train" does one important thing that many similar films don't manage to do - it sets things up and pays things off. And it does this so well, over and over again, that "Bullet Train" is one of the most oddly satisfying action films I've seen in a while.
"Bullet Train" exists in a hyper stylized version of Japan that is so clearly an exaggerated mishmash of common tropes, you can't really take offense. There are only two Japanese characters of note - Kimura (Andrew Koji) and his father The Elder (Hiroyuki Sanada), who are after the unknown assailant who threw Kimura's young son off a roof, and are the only ones who are given real stakes in the story. Everyone else on the train is some variation of hit man or ne'er-do-well. There's Ladybug (Brad Pitt), an ex-assassin taking what he thinks is a simple theft job after a stint in therapy. There are Tangerine (Aaron Taylor Johnson) and Lemon (Brian Tyree Henry), a pair of quippy assassin brothers who are supposed to retrieve the son (Logan Lerman) of a crime boss. There's a young woman who calls herself The Prince (Joey King), out for revenge. There's a venomous snake. Several other players are also involved, but they involve a lot of cameos and surprises that I don't want to spoil.
There's a lot of Quentin Tarantino in this movie, not just because Lemon and Tangerine are obviously doing the "Pulp Fiction" thing, but because the whole movie feels like an homage to various Asian media. Mostly this is in the aesthetics, which play around with a lot of colorful imagery, including a mascot character named Momomon, who appears in toys, advertisements, and a giant character suit. The tone is very light and characters are constantly shaking off grievous wounds and nonchalantly getting into insane scenarios. And either you can suspend disbelief long enough to enjoy the spectacle, or you can't. I generally enjoy ridiculous action films, so I didn't have much trouble, especially since "Bullet Train" was so doggedly committed to some of its sillier ideas. There are a lot of whimsical conceits in the film that could come across as annoying, like Lemon being obsessed with "Thomas the Tank Engine," The Prince waving around a very obvious Chekhov's gun, and a bottle of water briefly becoming a POV character. However, everything pays off. "Thomas the Tank Engine," the gun, the bottle of water, the snake, Momomon, all of it.
That probably says more about me and the kind of film fan I am than it does about "Bullet Train." I'm able to overlook the clashing accents, the obvious Orientalism and whitewashing, the plot holes everywhere (how long are they on that train?) and the endless amounts of exposition, because the script ticks the right boxes for me when it comes down to it. Brad Pitt and Brian Tyree Henry are allowed to be charming and fun. The worst of the baddies all get it in the end. There are enough twists and surprises that work, even if they're clumsy and half-baked. Heck, I know a whole subplot involving a barely glimpsed train conductor was cut out of the film, leaving some messy loose ends, and I don't really mind. This is a genre and subgenre I'm very familiar with, and seem to have a higher tolerance for than most. The most obvious points of comparison are much less successful exploitation B-movies like "Terminal" and "Gunpowder MIlkshake," all built around hyper-violent, hyper-stylized action showdowns dripping with comic book dialogue and cutesy character names.
"Bullet Train" is the bigger budget, better crafted version - which doesn't mean its up there with the "John Wick" movies, or even "Atomic Blonde," but it's decent fun for a weekend matinee.
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