Pitt’s charm not enough to save ‘Bullet’

be too kind. It’s like an imitation of a bad imitation of Tarantino — violent, unfelt and witless, and straining to be funny.

This becomes obvious early on, when a hit-man duo (Brian Tyree Henry and Aaron Taylor-Johnson) get into a dispute over whether they’ve just killed 16 or 17 people. To settle the dispute, they announce an Engelbert Humperdinck break; whereupon we see a succession of killings, to the accompaniment of Humperdinck singing “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.”

It’s fascinating the difference between funny and unfunny. Margot Robbie in a bubble bath talking about mortgagebacked securities (“The Big Short”) is funny. This isn’t. By the way, the fact that the song chosen here has “bubbles” in the title unconsciously reveals the inspiration for this tasteless digression. Word to the wise: If you’re going to copy another movie, try not to unconsciously confess your sources.

“Bullet Train” tells a fairly incoherent story about a number of career assassins and professional thieves, all competing against each other on a high-speed train from Tokyo to Kyoto. Brad Pitt plays a “snatch-and-grab” artist known as Ladybug, who is assigned to steal a suitcase and get off the train — a simple assignment that gets complicated.

Pitt is so assured here, so in command of himself as a comic actor, so fluid and spontaneous and such a delight to be around that, for scattered minutes at a time, he can make you believe that “Bullet Train” might be heading somewhere besides movie oblivion. As Ladybug, he’s a wellmeaning, affable guy steeped in pop psychology who sees the horrors around him not as terrifying, but as examples of spiritual error. It’s an almost-funny character that Pitt is able to make funny through his own ease and invention.

So all these people are on a train. They all want to kill each other. Half the time we don’t know why, and we don’t really want to know. Here and there, story information needs to be conveyed, so we get some fast-paced explanation that hardly registers and makes no sense, like something out of a bad Guy Ritchie movie.

Human life has no value, and death is a punch line — except when director David Leitch (“Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw”) arbitrarily tries to inject some emotion into the proceedings. But working off of Zak Olkewicz’s anemic script, the effect invariably rings sentimental and false.

Essentially, “Bullet Train” arrives in theaters already primed for the garbage disposal, but besides Pitt, there’s one more thing to save from the incinerator, and that’s Joey King’s performance as one of the assassins. The role is nothing, or would have been nothing with someone else in the role. But King brings wit, anger and pain, the complexity of a real person.

Still, don’t see her here, just wait. King is on her way to better things.