Summer visits to the theater can’t be compared with those at any other time of year. Memories of seagulls chasing my friends and me through the Big Lots parking lot as we ambulated from McDonald’s to the Marcus Cinema, for whatever comic-book hero or spectacle we were there to see, elicits a smile. Older now, I experience a similar joy when turning to my wife and spontaneously querying if she’d like to take in a movie that starts in ten minutes amid a sultry afternoon. We decide what to watch on the five-minute drive over, pulling into the parking lot to see a dozen cars at most and reveling in having a theater to ourselves.
Bullet Train was one such movie consumed out of spontaneity and, boy howdy, did it deliver. If you’ve ever thought, “I’d love it if Pulp Fiction had occurred in Japan,” then this is it. Our boyish, California-lovin’ protagonist, Ladybug, played more capably by the 58-year-old Brad Pitt than a man his age has any right to, stumbles aboard a bullet train with a simple mission that goes sideways, upside-down, and is inverted on a routine basis. The stars of the film are a pair of British brothers skilled in “wet work,” an across-the-pond analog to Samuel L. Jackson’s and John Travolta’s electric partnership in Fiction. Their charisma, eccentricities, and interplay carry the film as capably as the Japanese transit system.
Director David Leitch, best known for Deadpool 2 and Atomic Blonde, allows knives, katanas, firearms, and refreshment carts to fly about in hyper-realistic combat scenes that hearken to his early, uncredited work in the original John Wick — a revolutionary film in terms of combat choreography. The crunching of windpipes, copious blood, and pulpy kinetic interactions earn the movie its R rating, but rarely does it devolve into pornographic excess. The writing has wit, and Pitt’s character’s mystical wokeness offsets some of the most gruesome moments to hilarious effect. The movie has lines you and your buddies will quote to each other for years to come.
Ross Douthat reviewed Bullet Train for the magazine, and it’s a fine read. That said, his light criticisms of it are less convincing when put in the Japanese context.
Douthat writes:
In everything else, though, the movie feels as if it needed to be pushed a little more on its decisions. The flashbacks go on too long and the director is too pleased with their flourishes. The characters are constantly paired off, in fights or conversations, but you often lose track of what’s happening with one pair while another duo is getting their backstory filled out — even though everything seems to be happening in the same three or four cars. The movie starts with a pretty full train but uses its noncombatant passengers for gags and then makes them evaporate; the unrealism is fine but there are a lot of missed opportunities for misdirection and surprise.
As a foremost expert in Japanese culture and life — having spent three weeks there while my ship’s davit and close-in weapon system were repaired — I can authoritatively say the dreamy nature of the movie is intentional. Walking around Yokosuka and Tokyo, you find a surrealism to even the busiest parts of Japanese cities. Everything is hushed and private, and Bullet Train uses its Japanese setting to allow itself the room it needs to stage running gun battles, fist fights, and ridiculous repartee in the hushed spaces unique to Japan. It is not the right of passengers to intrude on the story; they play their small parts and take leave, allowing the train to carry the main characters to their final destination.
Bullet Train is worth tossing aside this chunk of prose, turning to your spouse, asking if he or she would like to take in a movie, and then walking out the door five minutes later — with beverages and snacks surreptitiously stowed in a large bag. Bullet Train has a heart, never takes itself too seriously, and makes you dread the last stop on the line. Just be doubly sure to show the conductor your ticket.