For a movie that talks up themes of luck and fate, there’s a lot of very manufactured, very controlled, and very purposeful ingredients to Bullet Train, the latest American impersonation of a Japanese title. From the specificities in the editing choices to the deliveries of wry dialogue and Chekhov’s Guns upon Chekhov’s Guns, everything in the movie is fairly deliberately orchestrated to appropriate a particular effect. I say appropriate, because David Leitch’s high-octane action-comedy only resembles the kind of movie it wants to be, its’ efforts to actually achieve that character it desperately is chasing are too forceful, too direct, too deliberate so as to be pathetic in execution. Further, it’s commitment to the stylistic architectures it would ape only obfuscates its’ own plot to the point of incoherence. Appropriate is also the right term because once again this is a Japanese story that has been retrofitted with mostly white people.
It was a book by Kōtarō Isaka, and to be fair he has defended the general whitewashing of his story -what’s perhaps more egregious is that for all of its’ Japanese dressing, how American the whole production is. It was clearly shot entirely in L.A. with mostly conveniently available actors on sound-stages and interior sets; two major British characters are played by Americans putting on accents, same for a couple Russians. And its’ understanding of Japanese customs and ephemera seems limited -they know about those toilets but not particularly what anime is. Generally though Japan serves as merely the backdrop through the context of the bullet train, the colourful world against which the movies’ overlapping plots about assassins is set.
The thing is, there are actually a couple really good movies in Bullet Train, but they are presented in concert with about four of five other ones as a kind of chaotic homunculus of differing plot threads, goals, motivations, and conflicts. And so you have Brad Pitt playing an assassin nicknamed Ladybug who suffers repeated bouts of what he calls ‘bad luck’ (he’s essentially a walking Murphy’s Law), filling in at the last minute on a job that requires apprehending a briefcase on a bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto. On that same train are a pair of British hitmen (Brian Tyree Henry and Aaron Taylor-Johnson) tasked with escorting home the son of a Russian mob boss as well as the case that Ladybug is after. Then there’s a Japanese gangster (Andrew Koji), lured to the train to be the pawn of a sadistic teenage killer (Joey King), who’d injured and is now threatening to kill his young son. And several more underworld figures with their own narratives enter the movie at various times crossing paths and complicating matters further. Also, everyone’s known only by their whimsical or ironic nicknames, with which they’re introduced in obnoxious freeze-frame.
This is one of the more obvious devices Leitch and screenwriter Zak Olkewicz are ripping wholesale from Guy Ritchie, the source also of its’ attempts at rapid-fire witty dialogue by violent crime figures often in cockney accents. Of course Ritchie himself was an imitator of Quentin Tarantino, who essentially originated this format of crime movie infused with wry, dark humour, shallow nods to philosophy, eccentric characters and esoteric pop culture references that has been gradually dying out in the last decade and a half. But Bullet Train is as dedicated to that sandbox as any of the forgettable post-Tarantino dreck of the late 90s and early 2000s, and is just as woeful. So many of its’ problems boil down to the convoluted plotting yet overzealous confidence of the script. The details in the storytelling, the pace of the dialogue and even several word choices and “subversive” characterizations speak unmistakably to a writer who thinks he’s much more clever and funny than he is. But things such as the snide attitude of just about every character towards violence just reinforces a lack of originality in how to define them, the quick executions of characters entering the fray with supposed buildup only emphasizes a lack of ideas, the frequent cutaways to exposition, backstory or montage only when immediately necessary reveals how poorly structured and frenetically composed the piece is, and the recurring bit driven deep into the ground around one character’s obsession with Thomas the Tank Engine merely showcases a feeble humour and embarrassing grasp of pop cultural integration.
In the final act, the film tries to gaslight you into thinking it was cohesive by stringing together each thread to unconvincing effect. It’s terribly messy, this interconnectivity, despite supposedly deriving from the original text, feels entirely retroactively concocted –as though the end of the movie were the final seasons of Lost, though more dysfunctional. And it’s there that the films’ faux-stylistic excesses and confounding plot devices reach their peak. There are bait-and-switches, lazy reversals disguised as plot twists –a character is brought back to life some half hour after their death scene to fulfil a quota for the finale.
What seems to matter most, at least to Leitch, is that Bullet Train looks cool, or in the absence of that gives off the air of cool. But neither he nor Olkewicz know how to achieve that for themselves. The latter can only resort to hollow mimicry and aesthetic artifice as a substitute for personality, while the former fares slightly better in articulating the visual components. I don’t mean in terms of the editing, which is frenzied and often seems to disguise cracks in the overall layout (it also reeks just as much of arrogant self-satisfaction). But Leitch is a competent action director and so the fight scenes that occur throughout are genuinely inventive and well-oriented within their environment. It’s also worth noting that the look of the movie, in terms of its clarity and colour is quite nice –especially next to that last non-franchise action blockbuster. Japan remains the setting purely for aesthetic purposes and while one could argue the ethics of aestheticizing a culture, it does result in a movie that at least is attractive to look at.
And as alluded to before, there are elements to this movie that would be compelling enough separate from the mess. Pitt’s character is honestly rather interesting on a conceptual level, a hired killer amusingly haunted by cosmic misfortune and inconvenience –he plays the part quite well too, typically smooth but also with some notable quirks. A movie just about him would have been great. And a movie just about Hiroyuki Sanada’s elder mob boss, the only figure whose natural cool is completely unscathed, would have been better. Each of the other threads have crumbs of potential, it’s a shame none were allowed any kind of opportunity to develop freely.
Sandra Bullock appears as the voice of Ladybug’s handler, and Channing Tatum makes a cameo as one of the passengers, meaning Bullet Train shares three cast members with The Lost City from earlier this summer (I can only imagine it was some kind of favour struck between the actors’ agents). That meta curiosity is maybe the movie’s only successful surprise. Bullet Train isn’t especially terrible for an action blockbuster, obnoxious and dated in its’ approach though it may be; and yet there is something gravely disappointing in its’ complete failure to make use of the interesting conceits and the talent that is there. And I won’t lie, if this movie had been done in Japan I might think differently on it. On some level it aspires to really distinguish itself from the pack, but critically can’t help succumbing to an intrinsically tepid Hollywood version of the movie it wants to be.
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