Bullet Train

Bullet Train often plays like an explosion at the screenplay factory.  It's overstuffed with witty assassins who know they're witty, and take every opportunity to show it.  A movie like this needs a straight man.  Instead, you have every actor in the movie trying to one-up everyone else, and act more silly, ironic, or smarter than anyone else.  

The problem with a movie like this is that there's no human element for the audience to attach themselves to.  When everybody in an action thriller talks like a stand-up comic, the audience knows that it's all an act.  Nobody talks or acts like these people do.  If you were in a room with people who talked like this, you'd go nuts wondering why nobody bothered to give you any one liners or smart remarks to say.  I get that this movie is trying to be a live action hyper-violent cartoon for adults, that I'm not supposed to think too much, and just enjoy.  But in a movie like this, where everybody's over the top and trying to be the most memorable thing about the film, it starts to resemble a competition.  They're not characters or people, they're just actors being silly for the sake of getting attention.

The film kicks off with a hired assassin using the code name "Ladybug" (Brad Pitt), who has had terrible luck with his last few missions, and is trying to get back in the game.  He only got this mission because the guy who was supposed to do it called in sick.  It's a simple mission.  He has to board a bullet train headed from Tokyo to Kyoto, grab a specific briefcase, and get off at the next stop where his handler (Sandra Bullock, the first of many cameos the movie throws at us) will be waiting.  Naturally, the job's not going to be as easy as all that.  There are other hired killers on the train as well, and even a poisonous snake that's been stolen from a local zoo, and has gotten loose.

Our killers include brothers "Tangerine" (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and "Lemon" (Brian Tyree Henry), who are working for a crime lord known as the "White Death" (Michael Shannon), and are trying to bring the briefcase and his son back safely.  There is also "The Prince" (Joey King), who poses as an innocent schoolgirl, but is secretly the most psychotic of all on board.  Also along for the ride is "The Father" (Andrew Koji), who wants to avenge his son who was pushed off the roof of a building, the Mexican killer "The Wolf" (musical artist "Bad Bunny"), who is seeking revenge for a hit on him, and "The Hornet" (Zazie Beetz), who specializes in poisons, and likes to torture her victims.

By this point, are you feeling restless?  Am I just going to be listing nicknames and personality traits for the rest of this review?  Well, reader, that's often what this movie feels like.  Bullet Train is overstuffed with character and plot, but never gave enough for me to be involved.  It tries to compensate by giving every one of its killers dialogue that sounds like scripted comedy material to the point that I felt like I was watching a bizarre open mic night at the improv where all the acts were trying to murder each other.  Believe it or not, there's even more characters who get involved other than the ones I listed above.  I had to stop myself, or else I'd be listing characters and nicknames for another paragraph. 

From time to time, the humor works, but when everybody is in on it, and trying to be the most outrageous one in the movie, it starts to feel overstuffed.  You know your movie is a bit too full when one of your characters is someone who dresses up in a Japanese mascot costume while on board and poisons their victims, and yet, she's only a minor character with about five minutes of screen time.  Screenwriter Zak Olkewicz is trying to balance all these bizarre people, their backgrounds, their reason for being on the train, and their connection with one another, but never comes across a way to make it seem not like contrivance.  

In order to be transported into a movie, I need to feel a connection.  Bullet Train feels like total audience manipulation from beginning to end, and I just didn't buy a second of it.

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