'Bullet Train' movie review: A wildly entertaining ride

Putting assassins on a train may not have the same impact as putting snakes on a plane but it sure is incredible, dumb fun

Bullet Train

Director: David Leitch

Cast: Brad Pitt, Joey King, Michael Shannon, Hiroyuki Sanada

Score: 3.5/5 stars

Age rating: A

Murder. Comedy. On a train. Let that sink in for a moment. There are more than a few movies, books and other media that combine at least two of these elements, but not many (if any) that do all three. And yet we are in 2022, with Bullet Train filling in for a dose of much-needed slapstick comedy with a side of uncompromising, endless murder mayhem on one of the the fastest land transport systems in the world.

Bullet Train adapts Kotaro Isaka's incredible dark comedy work MariaBeetle and broadly follows the same strokes, adding just enough changes to make it stand out on its own. It's very stylish and very comfortable in its own element, with nary a sign of pretentiousness or self-seriousness to drag it down. It knows what it is - it's fun, it's dumb and it's over-the-top. It's like watching a live-action anime, only one that isn't actually bad.

Bullet Train runs for just about two hours, conveniently the same amount of time it takes for an actual bullet train to get from Tokyo to Kyoto. I'm not entirely sure it was intentional but it sure was poetic. The film wastes no time getting into the meat of the matter, moving from one eccentricity to another, be it fights, talking, expositing some backstory or even breaking the fourth wall - and yet it never goes into the territory of stimulus overload, reining itself in enough to be digestible and never overwhelming or hard to follow.

It follows Brad Pitt as Ladybug, an assassin with the propensity for being utterly and perpetually unlucky, and what is supposed to be a simple snatch-and-grab: Steal a briefcase and leg it. Unfortunately, his bad luck pits him against 'twins' Lemon and Tangerine (who have their own entire shtick about their names); Yuichi, a father out for revenge; Wolf, another dude out for the shortest revenge mission ever; Hornet, an assassin who uses snake venom; and Prince, a girl who looks cute on the outside but is the most manipulative of the lot.

This utterly unlikely combination forebodes disaster, and soon enough, disaster does strike on the Shinkansen as the hitmen play out a mix of cat-and-mouse and whack-a-mole, with both meanings literally ending in people getting shot at, bitten, injected with venom, stabbed, and suffering all manner of grievous bodily harm. And all this for a briefcase of money and the son of the head of a crime gang who spends most of the movie as a corpse.

The film feels original in many ways, most notably in the fight choreography. If you can get past the fact that the film has some remarkably horrid ways of killing people, including dismemberment, snake bites and bleeding eyes, the film has some of the most enjoyable fight choreography in recent memory, with camerawork to supplement it. Fights happen all across the train, from the seats in a silent car between Lemon and Ladybug to an all-out gun-and-sword battle literally everywhere, and it just refuses to let up. You'd expect to see this kind of violence in an over-the-top action anime or even a film like Snakes on a Plane (though they're not even remotely related, except for a stray snake lurking about on the train).

But if you look past all the slapstick disregard for human life, the overarching plot really is rather dark, even if used for comedic effect. Yuichi is manipulated with thoughts of revenge onto the train to kill The White Death, the leader of the aforementioned gang by the Prince, while Lemon and Tangerine risk their necks trying to save The White Death's son. The White Death himself is out for revenge against Carver, which puts poor Ladybug, who just wants to get off the train, into his crosshairs.

The film also leans heavily on Lemon's obsession with Thomas the Tank Engine to describe its characters, the mentions of which may well have set a record in any setting outside of the show itself. It's not particularly deep as the labels keep shifting but it adds another layer to the mostly red-coloured cast of professional nutcases. David Leitch's adaptation, fortunately, is above reading too deeply into anything - it runs straight down the railroad of fun and that's ultimately what matters.