The Doctor’s Diagnosis: C+
The Italian poet Francesco Petrarch once wrote that “nothing is more hateful to wisdom than excessive cleverness.” There is much wisdom in the accumulated talent of Bullet Train, but the film’s obsession with its own sense of cleverness often overrides the positives on display and gets in the way of its own plot. There is a great crime/action film here somewhere, but it is too often crushed by the weight of its over stylized presentation and dialogue. In the spirit of my pretentious quoting of Petrarch, it is a good film that’s sabotaged by its oddly insecure need to constantly tell you how hip and cool it is.
Brad Pitt plays a hitman codenamed Ladybug that has taken a job stealing a briefcase containing $10 million that’s on a bullet train in Tokyo. Unbeknownst to him, the train is loaded with other hitmen and unsavory characters and he gradually realizes that he is in the middle of a web of stories and lies that has brought all of these miscreants aboard the same train. I won’t go further into the plot both because it would require spoilers and because the plot is somewhat secondary here. The focus is the characters and the setups and I wasn’t even entirely sure what the plot was until well into the film.
Bullet Train is highly reminiscent of late 90s – mid 2000s crime films, particularly the movies of Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie from that period. By “reminiscent,” I mean that it is a carbon copy of the style and quirks of films from that era, but can’t quite pull it off because of its very apparent desperation to pull it off. It is like listening to a cover band; they may technically be hitting the same notes but no matter how technically accurate the replication may be, it doesn’t sound the same. It doesn’t sound like the original, it sounds like someone playing the original. And that’s what Bullet Train ultimately feels like: a 90s cover band.
Pretty much every review that I’ve heard of this movie calls it over-written and, while I hate to repeat material from other reviews, that is a pretty unavoidable term here. Everything about Bullet Train is overwritten. This style worked when Tarantino and Ritchie did it because it felt fresh, but now it just feels like somebody going through a hip playbook from 1998. Characters are very casual and conversational while under life-threatening circumstances. Characters constantly make pop culture references (one guy is obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine and the initial conversation about it is humorous until you realize that he will literally do this in every conversation). The movie pauses every time a new character appears so that their name can appear on screen, which is a cliché that I hoped would have died a painful death by now. When a water bottle gets its own screen-pause intro, things have officially gone too far. Nobody feels real and there never feels like there are any actual stakes to anything because the characters are perennially concerned with proving how cool they are rather than acting like actual people in an actual situation. This somehow works in films from the late 90s-200s (think something like Snatch or Four Rooms), but it didn’t work for me here. It’s hard to put the reason into words, but Bullet Train doesn’t feel like the cool kid. It feels like the kid trying desperately to be the cool kid. And you can always pick out that fucker.
There are positives, though. There are individual set pieces and fight scenes that work, such as a flashback sequence of a massacre at a wedding, when they aren’t being interrupted by inane dialogue. The performances are generally solid. Pitt is playing possibly the most on-brand Pitt character ever, so it’s no surprise that he is genuinely entertaining and charismatic throughout. Joey King Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Brian Tyree Henry and Michael Shannon all also have notable performances as characters that I would like to see in a better written film. Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum also make cameo appearances, apparently returning the favor to Pitt for his role in The Lost City earlier this year. There is also one other major celebrity cameo that lasts for literally three seconds as the payoff to a joke. Unlike most of the film’s jokes, that cameo at least got a laugh in my theater.
Bullet Train was one of my most anticipated films of the year and, while it isn’t a bad movie, it is a disappointment. I suppose that the film is meant as a homage to the crime films of the late 90s, but it often comes across as more of a parody of that era than a tribute because everything is so hyper-exaggerated. If you like this sort of film from that era, then you might find more value here than I did. However, I love those late 90s movies and I still couldn’t get passed the imbalanced ratio of style to substance here.
Image by: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Train_(film)#/media/File:Bullet_Train_(poster).jpeg
