Bullet Train: A Sluggish Actioner With Straight-To-Streaming Energy
Five assassins aboard a fast moving bullet train find out their missions have something in common.
Bullet Train is a relatively joyless and uncompelling two-hour trudge. It’s a bulky, bloated, bland, and boring action comedy that runs out of track well before it literally decides to fall off the rails. It’s a film that harks back to the late-90s when ripoffs of Guy Ritchie, Robert Rodriguez, and Quentin Tarantino were all the rage, and one of the most grating characteristics of this absolutely sluggish “cool” guys-with-guns flick is how fun, funny, deep, exciting, and cool it thinks it is — and it’s essentially none of those things. If you took The Mexican, Snatch, The Usual Suspects, and John Wick and strained all the things that make them good/fun, and then filtered whatever was left through an adolescent’s creative viewpoint, you’d have something close to Bullet Train.
This overwrought misfire about strangers on a train is overstuffed with gratuitous flashbacks, “colorful” characters, silly and pointless backstories, and vapid monologues about fate and luck intended to convince you that there’s something meaningful there. It fires a lot of shots and throws a lot of punches, but very few of them actually connect — and much of the comedy unfortunately fails to land as well. It manages to muster up a few amusing pit stops along the way (the fist fight in the “quiet car” being a minor standout), but they’re far and few between. Given that this train is conducted by David Leitch, it really makes you wonder where the good fight sequences are — Atomic Blonde was a generic film, but even it had technical gusto and an amazing long-take action sequence, all of which is painfully absent here.
You know you’re in for a bumpy ride when the effortless charisma of Brad Pitt can’t save this trainwreck. But to Pitt’s credit, he tries — and he even pulls off a bucket hat in the process! In fact, most of the on-screen talent tries, but there’s not much they can do with the material they were given. Aside from Pitt, Brian Tyree Henry and Aaron Taylor-Johnson as “Tangerine” and “Lemon,” standout the most and manage to give the film a fleeting spark of emotion. Tyree Henry is also able to relentlessly dish out comparisons to Thomas the Tank Engine characters and not make you hate him or the gimmick entirely, which is a feat unto itself.
You get the sense that everyone off camera is uninspired and phoning it in. The script from Zak Olkewicz is an absolute mess that needlessly weighs down the story in flashbacks and backstory, neither of which make you care about the characters or lean into the narrative. We’re told the story of Bullet Train’s Keyser Söze-esque villain at least three times, and none of them add any intrigue or information to the mix. On the whole, Leitch’s direction is sorely lacking energy. The camera seems about as apprehensive to engage in combat as Brad Pitt’s ladybug, and it’s a shame. It’s also quite funny that the exterior shots of the train make it seem like it’s speeding along, but the interior shots make it seem slow as molasses. The cinematography from Jonathan Sela also isn’t too great; the film has the look and feel of a straight-to-streaming effort, as opposed to something that plays on the big screen.
With Bullet Train, all the bad luck falls on the audience. Even though it manages to pick up some steam near the end, it’s too overdrawn and tedious for it to make much of a difference. After two hours of messy mayhem and boring banter, you’re likely to feel just as worn out and eager for things to end as its remaining characters when the film finally — finally! — nears its last stop. It’s such a sluggish, unexciting, and uninspired ride that they should have called it “Tortoise the Tank Engine,” “Idiotic Strangers on a Train,” or “Snake on a Train,” all of which clue you in a bit more into this disappointing snoozefest.
Recommendation: Unless you’re incredibly bored or need to kill an afternoon, we say save your money and avoid the ride. Wait to catch this one for free on streaming, which is where it ought to have been dumped in the first place.
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