It has been more than a quarter of a century since “Pulp Fiction,” and I am on my knees, begging filmmakers to stop trying to ape early Tarantino. Seriously, stop it. It’s embarrassing. Even Quentin Tarantino isn’t doing early Tarantino anymore.
The latest offender is David Leitch’s “Bullet Train,” which is being advertised – sensibly! – as a slam-bang action extravaganza. And, to be clear, there is plenty of action. But there are also the characters of “Lemon” (Brian Tyree Henry) and “Tangerine” (Aaron Johnson), a pair of bickering contract killers who argue over their code names and make irreverent references to pop culture. (They’re played as Cockney Brits, which I guess counts as a variation – the dialect makes them simultaneously feel like a riff on Guy Ritchie, an earlier Tarantino imitator.) The bulk of said references are to Thomas the Tank Engine, and if you find that idea irresistibly funny, boy do I have good news for you: you’ll hear riffs on it many, many, many times over the course of the film’s interminable 126 minutes, and suffice it to say that a joke that’s barely amusing on its first telling is downright risible by its twelfth.
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At any rate, Zak Okewicz’s screenplay (drawn from Kōtarō Isaka’s novel) assembles several strands, populated by colorful criminal characters, on board the titular train, though there’s narrative hopscotching, including frequent “Kill Bill”-style digressions into montaged backstories for side characters we’re not all that invested in. Most importantly, it’s chock full of self-conscious “cool” flexing – slo-mo, loud needle drops, sunglasses, etc – but nothing is less cool than a movie trying to be cool. It ends up playing like “Smokin’ Aces” or “Boondock Saints” or the desperate Tarantino knock-off of your choice.
Brad Pitt (a vet of both Tarantino and Ritchie) stars as a “snatch and grab man” with the code-name Ladybug. His seemingly simple mission: to board the bullet train in Tokyo, make his way through its 16 cars (ten economy, six first class), find a specific briefcase, and hop out at the next stop, which he has to do quickly because the train only stops one minute in each station. Ladybug is working his way back into the criminal life, but with an improved perspective: “You are getting the new and improved me,” he assures his handler, and spends most of the movie spouting self-help aphorisms like “Hurt people hurt people.”
Unfortunately, he’s not the only one on the train on a mission. There’s the aforementioned Lemon and Tangerine, the son of the underworld boss whom they’ve just rescued, another hired killer known as the Hornet (Zazie Beetz), and Kimura (Andrew Koji), who is trying to find the person who pushed his young son off a roof, and Prince (Joey King), who has an evil plan of her own. And there’s also an extremely poisonous snake, so yes, there’s a snake on a train.
Juggling this many characters and plotlines and complications requires real narrative discipline, which is a problem because there’s no real internal logic to what happens onscreen. Cars are conveniently empty when they need to be, and there doesn’t seem to be any train crew around – which is convenient, I guess, since otherwise the bodies or wreckage might be found, or someone might respond to the frequent gunshots. But everyone’s relationship to everyone else is laboriously teased, so that much time can be spent in the climax explaining who everyone was and what they were doing, as if any of it matters, particularly when sensible audience members will likely be eyeing the exits.
“Bullet Train” is, to be fair, not a film without its pleasures. It features a fair amount of Pitt, as a not-too-bright guy, trying to think his way out of a bad situation (an underrated entertainment, if we’re being honest). Joey King is clearly reveling in her bad girl turn, and Henry is, as always, fun to watch. Sandra Bullock, sadly, is literally phoning it in as Pitt’s handler, and though Michael Shannon gives a little juice to the picture with his late entrance, by that point, there’s only so much he can do.
Director Leitch broke through as part of the team responsible for “John Wick,” and his credited feature debut, “Atomic Blonde,” was an absolute blast — an inventive and frequently breathless expansion of that film’s borderline balletic action beats. He then had to go serve his time in the industry’s sequel and spin-off machine, but the “Bullet Train” fight sequences recapture the delightfully manic energy of his earlier work. The “quiet car” bit is a lot of fun, a well-choreographed bit of cheekily clever hand-to-hand combat that Pitt and Henry try desperately to keep to themselves, and the use of props as improvised weaponry, a nod to Jackie Chan, is seen here in a well-done snack bar fight. Leitch also stages a samurai sword battle that’s legit thrilling, and a couple of side bits — including Pitt trying to clean up the mess made by a particularly messy brawl — land nicely.
But this is not the return to form Leitch needs, and that’s mostly because the well-crafted fight scenes are surrounded by so much other nonsense. The picture wants to be a manic action-comedy freight train, but it has exactly three jokes — Ladybug’s “Biblical bad luck,” his self-help trip, and the Thomas the Tank Engine thing — which are told and retold, and then told again. The action is impressive, but most of the good bits are in that trailer that’s been so ubiquitous in theaters these past few months. That was, at the very least, accurate advertising, because watching “Bullet Train” is very much like watching its trailer for two-plus hours. [C-]
