Starring: Brad Pitt, Sandra Bullock, Hiroyuki Sanada, Michael Shannon, Andrew Koji, Brian Tyree Henry, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Bad Bunny
Distributor: Sony Pictures
Runtime: 126 mins. Reviewed in Aug 2022
Reviewer: Peter W Sheehan
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This American action-comedy tells the story of an unlucky assassin who accepts an assignment that puts him in conflict with lethal criminals who are travelling on the same train as he is through Japan. All the assassins want what he wants.
This comedy thriller is based on the novel, Maria Beetle (published in English as Bullet Train), by Japanese author Kotaro Isaka in 2010. It was adapted for the cinema screen by Zak Olkewicz. Japan’s speedy trains have long been associated in the cinema with criminals on board. David Leitch, who directed this movie was the director of Deadpool 2 in 2018.
On a high-speed Bullet Train, an assassin, under the code name of Ladybug (Pitt), boards as a passenger in Tokyo with a mission to steal a briefcase with $10million in it, somewhere on the train. His personal history suggests that a lot of people die when they are around him, and he wants to change that. When Ladybug boards the train, he is determined to have a more peaceful existence than he has experienced in the past, but his life is full of fatal accidents, killings and terrible incidents. In this Bullet Train, there is an army of assassins and criminals, including a child-killer, who are all looking for the same briefcase, and there are old foes.
Ladybug’s ‘handler’ is Maria (Bullock), who is not on the train, but trains Ladybug as a professional killer, and plans his assignments. Ladybug manages to swipe the wanted briefcase, out of the hands of two hitmen – Lemon (Henry) and Tangerine (Taylor-Johnson) – who had planned a special operation and risked death to get it. Lemon and Tangerine now must find the person on the train who stole their briefcase. There are other killers on the train, who think that Ladybug is the culprit, and one of them, Wolf (Bad Bunny), is out to kill Ladybug for other reasons. Ladybug, who has the briefcase, has no idea of how to get off the speeding train, and to make things worse there is a large poisonous snake roaming out of captivity through the train.
This comedy is built on the premise that if things can go wrong, they will. Ladybug knows that when the train reaches its destination, there will be another army of assassins known as ‘the white death’ (Sanada, Shannon and Koji), who also want his briefcase, and will do anything to get it. As Ladybug’s past suggests, things do go wrong, but the film treats his character ironically: he is so unlucky, he thinks he must be cursed, and events bear him out.
The movie’s plot is chaotic. Frequent flashbacks hide surprise plot twists. Assassins try to murder each other, kill Ladybug, and all of them want the briefcase. But tucked away in the violent moments, there are comic moments that aim to entertain. For example, hardened criminals respect the train’s ‘quiet cars’, and they fight in rhythm with the film’s musical soundtrack. Leitch combines violent action with humour, that extracts comic relief from murderous intent. One of the assassins wants to kill another, simply because a killing rampage went wrong. Although Ladybug has stolen the briefcase, he has no idea what to do with it. The briefcase is a crisis for him, that he finds difficult to solve on a train that is going more than 200 miles an hour, with nowhere to hide, and making only one-minute stops along the way.
Violent movies typically show physical force intended to harm, destroy, or maim, whereas comic films orient viewers towards happy events. A film that is intended to be both has a problem to solve. Violence and comedy are opposing features of human behaviour, and when the two are joined together, violence tends to get the upper hand. It is a tribute to Leitch as director, and to actors such as Pitt, that comic intent is well maintained in this movie, and what’s violent is vigorously integrated with what’s comic. This film delivers thriller action chaotically. The violence is so extreme that Leitch uses it to almost desensitise those who do the watching. This calculated strategy works, but only partially. This is a violent film.
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