126 min | R | August 5, 2022 | Columbia Pictures
An assassin with rotten luck boards a bullet train for a simple grab-and-go. The car is packed with rival killers, all circling the same briefcase. The only thing harder than the job is getting off the train alive.
Ladybug is an assassin with bad luck and a new commitment to nonviolence. His handler sends him onto a bullet train running from Tokyo to Kyoto to grab a briefcase and slip off at the next stop. The job is simple. The train is not. It carries a half-dozen other killers whose targets and grudges all braid together around that same briefcase. The film builds itself as a machine of coincidence, where every plan exists to collide with every other plan. It is about engineering, not people.
Brad Pitt plays Ladybug loose and bemused, a contract killer who would rather quote his therapist than throw a punch. He carries the comedy and gives the film its only relaxed pulse. Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Brian Tyree Henry play Tangerine and Lemon, British assassins who bicker like an old married couple, and Henry’s running fixation on Thomas the Tank Engine is the sharpest character writing here. Joey King plays Prince with poisonous sweetness, hiding a killer behind a schoolgirl act. Andrew Koji plays Kimura, a father hunting whoever pushed his son off a roof, and supplies the one thread of genuine stakes. Hiroyuki Sanada and Michael Shannon arrive as The Elder and White Death and bring a gravity the rest of the train lacks.
David Leitch directs from a script by Zak Olkewicz, and his background as a stuntman shows in the close-quarters fights. The choreography uses the train’s tight geography, staging combat between seat rows and inside cramped bathrooms where neither fighter has room to swing. The camera stays close and the cuts stay legible, so the violence reads clearly even at speed. Leitch drenches everything in neon and stages flashbacks with freeze-frames and on-screen labels that announce each new player. The soundtrack leans on Japanese-language covers of Western pop songs, a cute trick that wears thin. The script keeps stopping the momentum to explain its own clockwork, and the explanations bury the fun.
Bullet Train wants to be a candy-colored crime riff and a tender story about fate at the same time. It cannot hold both. The brutality undercuts the comedy and the comedy cheapens the brutality, and the film keeps lurching between the two registers. Every character gets a backstory, a quip, and a fight, and the sheer volume of incident keeps any of it from landing. The pieces are slick and the cast is game. The movie is a delivery system with nothing to deliver.