Bullet Train (2022)
“Let this be a lesson of the toxicity of anger”
Everything you’ve seen, read or heard about Bullet Train is true: It’s loud, brash, bloodily brutal and if not quite as repeatedly funny as the filmmakers would like you to believe, they’ve drawn some eclectic and entertaining characters who are seemingly thrown together on a sparsely populated train headed at high speed for Kyoto, Japan. Considering 95% of the film is contained within a 16 carriage speeding train, the fight/stunt scenes are incredible, some major deaths a surprise, a minor unnamed cameo too and by the time the film’s out of control FUBAR denouement is signalled by a Japanese version of Bonnie Tyler’s “Holding Out For a Hero”, I rather hope you’ll be smiling from ear to ear and going along for the ride.
Here’s something you may not have read about this film: the titular star and evergreen handsome man Brad Pitt doesn’t have as big a role in the film as you’d perhaps imagine, and that’s to the credit of and a compliment to the director, David Leitch. Pitt rather bookends the film and this is again a compliment to the director and his screenplay writer Zak Olkewicz as well drawn and thorough a character as portrayed by Pitt is, he’s surrounded by a plethora of characters that all demand screen time and dominate when they have it. Pitt’s character is the central cog around which the film turns, a kind of born again stoner assassin who after therapy spurns guns in favour of life preserving hand to hand combat sure, but also wishes to spread the good word of recovery!
“Give peace out. Get peace back in”, or “So quick to anger. So quick to blame” or indeed even within the fight scenes themselves “Let this be a lesson of the toxicity of anger”. A born again assassin may be pushing it, or has Pitt’s character simply given into the twists and turns of “fate”, a central theme of the film as a whole as well as a word repeated almost as often as two other regularly used words here beginning with the letter f?
I’ve deliberately left Brad Pitt’s character name vague as you’ll read below, but it would be remiss of me not to name check his co-stars here as this is the epitome of an ensemble performance with Aaron Taylor-Johnson brilliantly eccentric and seemingly unable to complete a sentence without exclaiming “fuck” or “fucking” and Johnson’s performance is aided and abetted by Brian Tyree Henry as his loving, annoying brother as well as obsessionally judging other people based on the characters of the “Thomas The Tank Engine” television show! They bounce off each other perfectly and whilst there are a host of Japanese male actors I’m unaware of, the two female lead roles see Zazie Beetz follow up her superb performance in 2020’s Nine Days with another outing here and a larger screen presence is reserved for Joey King as a schoolgirl femme fatale and quick talking assassin.
Bullet Train centre’s on luck, chance, the aforementioned fate and arguably “karma” too, but above all it’s a twisted revenge tale of “outside contractors” or hired assassins based on the 2010 novel “Maria Beetle” of an Elder and a “Carver”, “White Death”, The Prince, The Father, The Hornet and The Wolf all circling a lemon, a ladybug and a tangerine.
Oh, and a poisonous snake called “Boomslang”!
Directed by David Leitch, his huge career as a stunt co-ordinator prior to becoming a fully fledged director is as well represented here as you’d imagine but so is the film as a whole and follows the explosive fun and tongue in cheek Atomic Blonde and Deadpool 2 helmed by director Leitch in 2017 and 2018 respectively.
I heartily recommend this to you and I’d also endorse watching this with your favourite people in the whole world and in an independent cinema in your local town.
I was lucky to do this tonight and I smiled all the way home.
“Bullet Train” can also be found within my 7 volumes of “Essential Film Reviews Collection” on Amazon with each and every volume free to read should you have a Kindle “Unlimited” package. All 9 of my self-published books can also be read for free on Kindle (but go on, treat yourself to a paperback or hardback version!) and should you watch my short Youtube video linked in the middle of this article you’ll also find links to my Patreon and Buy Me A Coffee and other ways of supporting my work as an independent writer.
"The Essential Film Reviews Collection VOL.1" - link to Amazon
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.