Brad Pitt stars as assassin in murder on disorient express
In “Bullet Train,” Brad Pitt plays a lovable-loser assassin (code name: Ladybug) bent on self-improvement. He’s an easygoing sweetie, in the spirit of John Cusack’s gun-for-hire in “Grosse Pointe Blank,” to name one film you may wish you were rewatching instead of watching this one. This one’s well made in its chosen attack. It’s fun for a while. And then, not so much.
I say this realizing “Bullet Train” may well be exactly what millions of summer ’22 action fans are after: ultraviolence without weight, though there’s a stab at human feeling in its interrelated stories of competing assassins after a precious suitcase on a superfast train from Tokyo to Kyoto.
The movie’s overture misleads the audience into expecting a somber underworld crime drama. A preteen boy, injured in a plunge off a rooftop, lies in a hospital bed. The boy’s father (Andrew Koji) gets a lecture from his gang lord father, The Elder (Hiroyuki Sanada), about his failure to protect his family. The Elder is fighting for criminal dominance, we soon learn, with a Russian interloper, White Death (Michael Shannon).
En route, “Bullet Train” plays around with flashbacks and visual footnotes. On board the train, bickering twin London assassins (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Brian Tyree Henry) carry the code names Tangerine and Lemon, and debate the implications of Lemon’s lifelong devotion to Thomas the Tank Engine.
A shifty young woman dressed in Japanese schoolgirl garb (Joey
King) changes personalities and alliances like the wind. A knife-wielding, vengeance-seeking Mexican drug cartel heir known as Wolf (Puerto Rican rapper-turned-actor Bad Bunny) has come to Japan to kill the man, or woman, who executed an entire wedding party.
Through it all, Ladybug is just trying to get the right suitcase and get off at Kyoto in one piece. With the voice (Sandra Bullock’s) of his supercool handler murmuring in his ear, Ladybug soon realizes the extend of his competition on board. They’re there for interrelated reasons. Their connections from prior engagements — the cartel wedding job; a 17-corpse melee in Johannesburg — are revealed over the course of two hours of peppy carnage, numbing glibness and the occasional payoff.
An adaptation of the 2010 Kotaro Isaka novel, one of his popular “Hitmen” series, “Bullet Train” has been cast, deftly, with actors ready to play. Even Pitt, never much in the verbal-facility or quicktime dialogue department, loosens up and finds an effective sweet spot at the intersection of unkillable
tough guy and exasperated bad-luck charm.
The spirit’s almost there to pull it off. But the movie does grind on. The later stages of “Bullet Train” jumps the rails figuratively and literally; the best bits are content to work through smaller problems either in economy or firstclass, wherein no one can fully trust anyone.
At one point the childlike assassin Lemon complains about the state of entertainment today: “twists, violence, drama — no message.” He’s talking about the movie he’s in, of course. But that word “drama” doesn’t quite fit, because drama would require different and more interesting rules of engagement. I enjoyed the work of the actors here. Caring about what they’re up to, even in a larky Neverland of hard-R slaughter, is another story.
MPAA rating: R (for strong and bloody violence, pervasive language, and brief sexuality)
Running time: 2:06
How to watch: In theaters