Review: Bullet Train

Brad Pitt plays an assassin codenamed Ladybug, who accepts a mission from his handler (Sandra Bullock) to board a Japanese bullet train, grab a briefcase and quickly get off at the next stop. Because this is a movie, that mission comes with a few snags in the form of various killers with various missions and motivations of their own. Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Brian Tyree Henry play chatty cockney assassins, Joey King is another assassin with a revenge plan to carry out, Andrew Koji and Hiroyuki Sanada play father and son, and Michael Shannon is the  Russian crime lord referred to as ‘The White Death’. 

 

A lot of people seemed to really like this 2022 David Leitch (“Atomic Blonde”, producer of “John Wick”) assassin action/comedy. Hi, I’m not a lot of people. I don’t know how people managed to sit through two hours of this annoying chatterbox without complaint, 85 minutes was far more than enough I felt. Hiroyuki Sanada and an uncredited Channing Tatum are good, but not in the film enough for it to really matter. This is “Smokin’ Aces” on a train but not nearly as much fun as that description sounds. Influenced by Tarantino, Carnahan, and Ritchie, this one’s all talk all the time, despite the director’s stunt background. It’s deathly dull stuff.

 

The cast is mostly unpersuasive. Joey King can do an English accent rather well, but is otherwise forced and terrible. Brad Pitt and Sandra Bullock are coasting and frankly boring. Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Brian Tyree Henry’s cockney banter grew old on me almost instantaneously. I’d commend Henry for nailing the accent 90% of the time, unfortunately that 90% just makes the other 10% stand out like a sore thumb. If the film is meant to be funny, it’s not. If it’s meant to be exciting, it’s the exact opposite. The best I can say here is that it’s slightly less boring and slightly less derivative than the other Brad Pitt/Sandra Bullock/Channing Tatum film, “The Lost City”.

 

This really ought to have been somewhat entertaining. The premise is workable and there is talent in the cast but the execution sucks. How does a stunt guy make such a boring action film? Especially when they’ve worked on the “John Wick” franchise and know how it’s done it’s stupefying. Forced, unoriginal, and dull. Good-looking, but so what? Based on a book by Kotaro Isaka, the screenplay is by Zak Olkewicz (“Dracula: Voyage of the Demeter”, which I rather enjoyed). I don’t see the fuss here, I’m afraid.

 

Rating: C-

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