To choreograph all this, both on a story level and an action-design level, and to make it make any kind of sense is a fairly impressive feat. It’s not afraid to let you simply enjoy it. It doesn’t take itself seriously, which helps a lot. It’s all manipulation and extended cinematic sleight of hand, but the film embraces its absurdly colorful, noisy, gonzo artificiality. Not unlike the aforementioned Final Destination pictures, there is nothing particularly organic in this movie. Ladybug laments his desperate bad luck, but of course, we get to see just how incredibly lucky he actually is. They don’t explain so much as create a uniquely poppy dubstep rhythm to the film, as striking in its own way as the syncopated smashing, punching, kicking, and bouncing of the fight scenes.Īnd very often what determines the outcome of a scene is not skill or purpose but sheer chance and fate, working in all the Rube Goldberg ways that fate seems to work in movies. But whereas Tarantino uses such time-jumps to create more absorbing stories and add depth to his characters, for director Leitch and screenwriter Zak Olkewicz, adapting Kōtarō Isaka’s 2010 novel, these flashbacks are as much stylistic elements as they are narrative devices. Not unlike a Quentin Tarantino film (and not unlike any number of Tarantino imitators that populated movie screens in the late 1990s and early 2000s, including some of Guy Ritchie’s early work), Bullet Train constantly leaps back in time - sometimes plunging into full-bore narrative digressions, sometimes skipping across brief flashbacks - to situate us in the present and explain various motivations and backstories. There is … well, there’s more, but I’ve probably already said too much. And a big bouncing pink mascot for a popular children’s show. There’s also a deadly snake on the loose. Then there’s Brad Pitt’s Ladybug (that’s a code name), who has been hired to snatch and grab the aforementioned briefcase with zero idea of what’s in it, who he’s stealing it from, or to whom it ultimately belongs. There’s the Wolf (Bad Bunny), a Mexican assassin whose whole world was wiped out when someone poisoned the wine at his wedding naturally, he, too, is out for revenge. There is the Prince (Joey King), a stuck-up teenage girl with some mysterious murderous plans of her own. Tangerine (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Lemon (Brian Tyree Henry), known together as the Twins, are there to deliver to a mysterious and all-powerful Russian gangster his deadbeat son (Logan Lerman) and a briefcase full of money. Distraught gangster Kimura (Andrew Koji) is there to track down (and presumably kill) whoever recently pushed his young son off a roof. To describe the plot of Bullet Train in any detail would send one down more than a dozen wormholes, but ultimately it’s all kind of the same thing, so here’s a general outline: The action takes place on a train speeding from Tokyo to Morioka on which a number of criminals have converged. I took something like 50 pages of notes, and I still feel like I caught about half of what happened. Not to mention the film’s conviction that there is no level of baroque narrative digression a modern audience will not tolerate. And at times, David Leitch’s film is almost as glorious as that description makes it sound - elaborate and ridiculous but dedicated to making the elaborate and the ridiculous feel … well, not plausible, exactly, but certainly compelling and fun. Bullet Train feels like someone crossbred Kill Bill with a Final Destination movie.
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