Brad Pitt may have recently admitted to GQ that he knows he’s “on his last leg” with regard to his career (ergo, apparently, his life), but surely that doesn’t mean he ought to lie down and roll over entirely to schlock like David Leitch’s Bullet Train. And no, it isn’t a remake of the 1975 film, The Bullet Train, featuring a very Speed-esque plotline in which a Shinkansen is outfitted with a bomb that will cause the train to explode instantly if it should slow down to a speed below eighty kilometers an hour—unless, of course, the requested ransom is paid. Surely, however, the narrative of this Junya Satō film would be far more interesting to watch as a Brad Pitt remake than the story Zak Olkewicz has adapted for him from a Japanese novel called Maria Beetle.
So instead we are presented with a plot that finds an assassin nicknamed Ladybug (Pitt) returning to the mercenary scene after a bout with burnout (there’s no such thing as an “easy” job, after all). Granted, Pitt does a better version of this character type as Jerry Welbach in 2001’s The Mexican. In any case, armed with the therapy tools of his shrink (repeatedly referred to as Barry), Ladybug embarks upon what his handler, Maria Beetle, assures him will be a cinch. How could it not be? It simply involves extracting a suitcase full of cash from a bullet train traveling between Tokyo and Kyoto.
Unfortunately, second-act rules dictate that conflict must arise, whether logical or not, and, oh, how it does—even if solely in the most overly contrived and non sequitur ways possible. For Ladybug isn’t the only assassin on the train. There’s also brothers Tangerine (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, showcasing his British accent to its full glory) and Lemon (Brian Tyree Henry), Yuchi Kimura (Andrew Koji), The Wolf (Benito A. Martínez Ocasio a.k.a. Bad Bunny), The Hornet (Zazie Beetz) and The Prince (Joey King). With so many other unknown agendas at play to Ladybug—who has been “lovingly” named this by Maria to prove to him that he doesn’t have the bad luck he thinks he does—the “explosivity” factor is certain to ramp up, as the pitch likely went to the studio.
And one can’t “technically” deny that’s what happens as The Wolf and The Hornet appear on the train in staggered phases—the former to exact revenge for an assassination job Ladybug pulled on his new bride and his entire cartel in attendance at the wedding. Provoking vengeance being just one of many hazards of Ladybug’s “trade.” In addition to yet another reason he keeps getting a bit “existential” about why he continues bothering to engage with this “career” at all (something Pitt, too, seems to be asking himself of late about acting). But Maria is certain to insist that he’s not so unlucky as he thinks he is—on a side note: isn’t it just such a mark of white male privilege to presume you’re unlucky merely because things don’t always go your way?
The constant “over-the-phone” repartee between Ladybug and Maria serves to remind that Leitch, being most well-known for directing Deadpool 2 (hence, a cameo from Ryan Reynolds in this), would like to fancy himself a seasoned pro in the tone of “action-comedy.” Something Guy Ritchie has technically long been doing with the majority of his “deadbeat gangster” movies (e.g., Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and the Brad Pitt-starring Snatch). And while Leitch certainly isn’t unversed in all things action and Brad Pitt (having served as a stunt double for the latter on such movies as Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Troy and Fight Club), he misses the mark with tone here thanks to Olkewicz’s script. Which, indeed, frequently comes across like a bad, off-brand imitation of Ritchie’s style—complete with arbitrary interrupting flashbacks and running soliloquies about how Thomas & Friends is a metaphor for life, as well as for easily assessing personality tropes (according to Lemon, pretty much everyone on the train is “a Diesel”).
And perhaps the “unwitting” Ritchie homage makes sense when taking into account the aforementioned profile for GQ. A cover story that did everything it could to be as “artsy fartsy” as possible, including securing Ottessa Moshfegh to do the interview and getting photographer Elizaveta Porodina to make him look très corpse-like for the spread. One almost wishes Pitt could have brought that same level of “edginess” to Bullet Train.
Instead, all Pitt brought was a bunch of his celebrity friends that he likely thought would pad the general lack of the movie. Perhaps in the hope of wanting to help their friend obfuscate the badness or perhaps wanting to repay the favor to Pitt for appearing in The Lost City, Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum are among such cameos in Bullet Train (the former in a very terrible, mulletous wig).
As Bullet Train plods along at a speed in direct contrast to what its title would suggest, we’re meant to be “wowed” by the array of supposed “twists and turns”—not so much Agatha Christie in nature as totally random and unstructured, designed to fill the hours for an audience looking only for “spectacle” and nothing else (Jordan Peele’s Nope has plenty to say about that). As Leitch noted, “In the conversations I had with Brad, the number one goal was to make a movie that’s entertaining and escapist and fresh and original, that will make people want to come back to the theater.” It might be an ersatz version of “entertaining and escapist,” but it’s definitely not the source that “will make people want to come back to the theater.” If anything, it will make them remember why they would rather just stream something equally as middling in the action genre as The Gray Man at home.
Regrettably, Bullet Train appears to be the product of Pitt’s GQ-delivered sentiment, “I just want to always make. If I’m not making, I’m dying in some way.” That’s fine, but next time, maybe don’t kill the rest of us (i.e., our brain cells) to “make” something like Bullet Train.
