Movie Review: Bullet Train (2022)

Sony Pictures Entertainment

Original title: Bullet Train
Year: 2022
Duration: 127 min.
Country: United States
Directed by: David Leitch
Screenplay: Zak Olkewicz (based on the novel by Kôtarô Isaka)
With: Brad Pitt, Joey King, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Brian Tyree Henry, Andrew Koji, Hiroyuki Sanada, Zazie Beetz, Michael Shannon, Sandra Bullock.
Grade: 8.5/10

Bullet Train (2022) is directed by David Leitch, the director of Deadpool 2 (2018) and Atomic Blonde (2017). It is a film that amalgamates the style of films like Snatch (2000) or Pulp Fiction (1994), and although it does not reach their level, that does not mean that it is not entertaining.

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The film stars Brad Pitt as Ladybug, a recovering psychiatric killer who has accepted a light job: boarding a bullet train headed for Tokyo, grabbing a silver briefcase, and getting off at the next station. What could go wrong, right? But lo and behold, Ladybug is a guy who is chased by bad luck without giving him a break, so after being with him for just a few minutes the viewer knows that everything that can go wrong will go wrong.

Important detail: Ladybug is a last-minute replacement, replacing a colleague named Carver. But hey, even if Carver doesn't show up, murderers are what's left on board the train: on the one hand we have Lemon and Tangerine (Brian Tyree Henry and Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a couple of murderers who have just rescued the rambunctious son of the fearsome yakuza boss known as the White Death and is taken to Tokyo, plus another assassin we'll call the Father (Andrew Koji), who is looking for the fiend who threw his little son off a balcony and left him in a coma, who in turn turns out to be being a nice schoolgirl who reads Trevanian (Joey King). She is the mastermind behind a plot involving the Father, Lemon, Tangerine, and an assassin named Hornet (Zazie Beetz), among others.

The film takes place for the most part in real time, with flashbacks that both tell us the story of a bottle of mineral water and help us settle the question of how many died rescuing the son of the White Death. There's a lot, a lot of violence, although somehow it reminds us more of Saturday morning cartoons than John Wick. And to round off the surrealism of this whole story, we have Momomon, a little anime character who hangs around the wagons handing out stuffed animals and other not-so-healthy things.

And of course, Ladybug's bad luck is contagious and things get complicated not only for him but for the rest of his colleagues. In addition, the schoolgirl is not the only one with a plan, but someone has brought them all together , those who are on board and those who will go up in the successive stations, so that they end up killing each other. So the corpses are piling up and we will have stabbings, silenced shots with stuffed animals, explosions, katanas amputating limbs, poison syringes, a very dangerous snake stolen from the zoo and Thomas the locomotive stickers. (And yes, Thomas stickers do have their place in the plot.)

There's also plenty of CGI, generally well applied, though not always. Of course, the cameos are well placed, like Channing Tatum's, or some that are essential to the plot and others the we don't know if they are cameos or just very brief roles, like Zazie Beetz's. And there's Ryan Reynolds as Carver, which, like Brad Pitt's in Deadpool 2, is one of those where you blink and miss it. (As I said at the beginning, David Leitch is the director of both films, so you do the math.) And like I said before, it may not reach the level of the classics of the genre, but it is very entertaining.

A special mention for the music of the film: both the incidental music by Dominic Lewis and the themes included in the soundtrack are more than adequate. The latter combines, among other things, a bit of J-pop, a song by Alejandro Sanz and a Japanese cover of a Bee Gees song.