Bullet Train (2022)

Brad Pitt's wild ride on a speeding train blends comic action and crunchy violence

Bullet Train (2022)

Action-comedy isn’t a genre I’ve taken to, so I felt thrown into the deep end of the pool as I watched Bullet Train shoot, stab, punch, poison, garrote and dynamite its way across the screen.

It stars Brad Pitt as a secret agent for some government or faceless institution I don’t think we’re meant to identify.  Code named Ladybug, he takes orders from his cool, savvy handler, whom we don’t see but hear on the phone.

She instructs him to board a bullet train in Tokyo, locate therein a most important metal briefcase, and when the train arrives in Kyoto hand the briefcase over to people who’ll understand what to do with it.  That’s all he needs to know.

What’s in that briefcase?  Ladybug’s handler isn’t telling.  But she pointedly insists that he take with him the gun that’s been left in a train station locker.  One reason he’ll need to pack heat is a pair of hitmen on board, cutely dubbed Lemon (Brian Tyree Henry) and Tangerine (Aaron Taylor-Johnson).

A longtime team, they’ve been hired to return the same briefcase to the White Death (Michael Shannon), a criminal mastermind in the international underworld.   Also on board is the White Death’s adult son, who Lemon and Tangerine need to safely return to his father.

Lemon (Brian Tyree Henry) and Tangerine (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) in Bullet Train

Perhaps Ladybug’s most deadly nemesis is one he knows nothing of, a ruthless, frighteningly deceptive young woman called Prince (Joey King).  She skillfully plays “naïve” to get the men on board to do her bidding.  Little do they know that her motives are as dreadful as any of theirs.

Zak Olkewicz’s screenplay quickly begins to feel like a giant contraption programmed to fill the screen with wizardly, non-stop, gory action.  But the zinging dialogue and brisk, chop-chop clashes so hoodwinked me that I rarely saw the tricks, dodges, feints and fakery coming.  I was gripped from start to finish.

At the same time, I couldn’t possibly believe the implausible ways the briefcase kept getting lost, found and lost again.  And its pursuers’ back stories were so hazily explained that they couldn’t be taken too seriously.  Nor could I accept at face value the murderous violence all the principals were willing to commit with lighthearted glee as the bullet train hurtled toward Kyoto.

Of course, none of this ever seems anything like real life.  What swept me along – “involved” is too strong a word – was director David Leitch’s breathless pacing (he’s helmed the John Wick franchise as well as that fabulous fight-fest Atomic Blonde (2017)).

The editing by Elísabet Ronaldsdóttir is knife-edge, sharp, stinging.  The stabbings, blows and gunfire kept me gasping.  And cinematographer Jonathan Sela’s shots were so tight and lucid that I couldn’t help wondering how intended victims were going to dodge the bullet, knife, sword or, yes, live poisonous snake, headed right for them.

Maybe because the movie’s techniques are intended as razzle-dazzle, they rarely feel ginned-up merely to shock.  They’re spun out and overdone in order to tickle and bemuse, which they spectacularly do.  The producer, Antoine Fuqua, is also a director who mainlines warp speed action, and I could feel him here urging everyone involved to hold nothing back. 

None of this would sustain a two-hour runtime without engaging performances, and all the leading actors here do pinpoint fine work.  Pitt and Henry most surprised and delighted me.  Oddly, compellingly, for two such giddily violent characters, many of their lines land softly, like pillows, funny as well as scary because both actors’ readings are unforced, devil-may-care.

Did they arduously rehearse?  I would guess so.  But do they sound rigid or bogus?  Never.  Their work bubbles with comic menace.  The other actors, too, seize the chance the writing and directing give them to go over the top but still absolutely nail the execution. Henry and Taylor-Johnson’s super-fast exchanges have a devilish, who’s-on-first hilarity.

Ladybug (Brad Pitt) and the briefcase that could get him killed in Bullet Train

The movie doesn’t aim to be more than a brisk, surreal, sometimes even grotesque, action flick, and how many of its devices are actually new I wouldn’t know.

But I do know that I had a rollicking good time watching Bullet Train whiz by.  I don’t dismiss its violence as cartoonish, because to me it sometimes felt just hurtful enough.  But I also wouldn’t try to elevate it by calling it stylized.

Deitch, at least in this movie, isn’t a director whose overriding concern is style.  He’s dedicated to verve, momentum and hokey, throwaway humor.  Is he coarse?  Sometimes, not often.  Is he funny?  Almost constantly.

I chuckled more than I laughed out loud.  But I kept smiling at how eager the movie was to entertain.  With serious subject matter I’m not sure what this team would do.  Possibly they’d freeze up, struggling for significance.  Here they stay breezy and morally unconcerned, laughably vicious, if that’s a thing, and also not full of themselves.  These decidedly shady characters were a kick to have around.