Bullet Train

David Leitch offers up an action-comedy that has glimmers of amusement but is too smarmy and convoluted to succeed.

It’s not fatal that Leitch and company have no evident goal other than to amuse audiences with two hours of spiffy nonsense, but there’s a whiff of try-hard desperation behind the film’s bravado.

It’s a shame that the filmmakers didn’t trust the spatial and dramatic tensions provided by the train journey, and opted instead for seen-it-all-before spectacle.

The largely entertaining action flick Bullet Train rolls along on the power of Brad Pitt’s megawatt charisma – and sometimes on that alone.

Bullet Train certainly serves the Brad Pitt brand, but it’s too weak to deliver him to a new destination.

This film adaptation, by screenwriter Zak Olkewicz, is a blessing and a curse. It creates, builds and lights the fuse on this Molotov cocktail. But the script’s overabundance of characters, dips in momentum and protracted ending don’t help.

There’s no reason the adaptation couldn’t have either cast Japanese actors or completely rid itself of the origin country by putting the train somewhere else entirely. Both options would have been better than what resulted.

Bullet Train is an exercise in tired, racist tropes and condescending Orientalism as it pushes for the imperialist notion that white people know how to do things better.

Bullet Train’s driving engine quickly loses steam. Its runtime is never justified, especially when it chooses to prioritize odd tangents over cogent and streamlined storytelling. 



Bullet Train is bombastic and silly, but it rarely pretends to be anything else. Is it a great movie? No, not by any stretch. Is it a fun movie? Yes, but like the rails, the bullet train goes off, mileage really may vary.