Bickering baddies and clichés galore – but it’s a riotous ride on Brad’s train
Bullet Train
Cert: 15, 2hrs 6mins ★★★☆☆
Luck
Cert: PG, 1hr 45mins ★★★☆☆
It is almost 30 years since Quentin Tarantino unleashed Pulp Fiction on an unsuspecting world, and close to two decades since Kill Bill. But my goodness, how his influence and film-making style live on. So much so that it’s hard not to stifle a groan as Brad Pitt’s new film, Bullet Train, begins to unfold in wearyingly familiar style.
Hitmen: check. On-screen captions telling you their nicknames: check. Cheesy music, in this case a burst of Bee Gees followed by some Engelbert Humperdinck: check. Violent flashbacks as two of those hitmen bicker and banter over their recent body count: check. Was it 16 or 17? Is it a quarter-pounder with cheese or a Royale? We seem to have made no movie-making progress at all.
But that’s because commercial cinema audiences still like this sort of thing and there will be a commercial audience for director David Leitch’s Bullet Train. It’s wholly unoriginal but well executed,
tailor-made for the crowd that like John Wick, The Hitman’s Bodyguard and early Guy Ritchie.
Based on a Japanese novel but performed by a predominantly Western cast, Pitt – sporting a bucket hat and an earpiece allowing him to talk to an unseen female controller – is the first hitman we see climbing on board the bullet train that will soon be speeding between Tokyo and Kyoto.
Given the new handle ‘Ladybug’ to counter his notorious bad luck, he’s clearly the nice one – friendly smile, reluctant to use a gun, keen to discuss karma – and he’s only after a briefcase.
But he knows, just as we do, that it’s never that easy.
Yes, there are at least four other hitmen on board: a couple of likely London lads, Tangerine (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Lemon (Brian Tyree Henry), who really do seem to have stumbled out of a Ritchie film; a wide-eyed but deadly young woman known as the ‘Prince’ played by Joey King; and a Japanese killer called The Father (Andrew Koji), who’s not really concentrating because his young son has just been pushed off the roof of a building.
Oh, and there’s also a deadly snake on board, slithering its way through the carriages. Yes, finally, the film we’ve all been waiting for, Snakes On A Train, has arrived. Well almost.
It’s all very convoluted, assorted flashbacks further confuse things and lesser assassins come and, er, go. But it does slowly get more entertaining – Pitt is laconic but fun, Taylor-Johnson better than he has been for ages (in a film packed with Thomas The Tank Engine references, listen out for his excellent impersonation of narrator Ringo Starr) and the North Carolina-born Henry gamely goes 12 rounds with a London accent… and loses.
The visual effects are, for the most part, pretty good: there are a couple of enjoyably silly fights – one in a Japanese quiet carriage, the other in buffet car – and do look out for the starry cameos from the likes of Channing Tatum, Ryan Reynolds and Sandra Bullock, the latter presumably returning the favour after Pitt’s brief turn in her last film, The Lost City.
Violent but, nevertheless, good holiday fun.
Luck is an important element of Bullet Train – the Prince thinks she is blessed with good luck while Ladybug knows he is not – but it’s even more central (unsurprisingly, given the title) to the new children’s cartoon Luck, now in cinemas as well as on Apple TV+.
It’s the first animated feature to be co-produced by former Pixar boss John Lasseter since his departure from Disney, Pixar’s notso-new owner, and certainly bears the hallmarks of previous Pixar hits such as Monsters, Inc, Inside Out and Soul.
It sees Sam (voiced by Eva Noblezada) a kindly 18-year-old orphan who’s plagued by bad luck and is now too old to stay at the children’s
home she loves, beginning a new independent life in the city. But she’s desperate for her young friend and fellow orphan, Hazel, to have better luck than her, particularly when it comes to finding a ‘forever family’.
So when Sam’s befriended by a black cat and finds a lucky penny, she thinks she might just have the answer. Until she drops her lucky penny down the toilet.
To cut a long and over-elaborated story short, she’s soon magically transported to the land of luck, where with the reluctant help of the by-now-talking cat, Bob, and a friendly leprechaun, called
Gerry, she begins the hunt for the missing penny.
Simon Pegg, reprising his dodgy Scottish accent from the Star Trek movies, feels like the wrong voice in the wrong role as Bob, but 84-year-old Jane Fonda is superb as the dragon who can sniff out bad luck at ten paces.
Worth it for her alone.