If you’ve seen the trailer for Bullet Train, starring Brad Pitt as a passenger on the titular Japanese express, you may feel – as I did – this looks like it could be rather fun.
OK, not particularly demanding fun maybe, but the idea of a reluctant hitman called Ladybug doing one last job – particularly a hitman played by Brad Pitt – certainly has its attractions.
Photo: Screenshot
Add to the mix a good cast - especially, in the role of Ladybug’s handler…. Well, I can’t really name the top star playing the handler, even if she is all over the trailer.
In the film she’s mostly a faceless voice on the phone until the big reveal. So, let’s call her Zsa Zsa Gabor, to avoid ruining the surprise at the end of Bullet Train.
I can tell you that Brad and Zsa Zsa have chemistry in spades and deserve a better film.
Bullet Train is based on a Japanese book – it feels like a Manga comic book, with all its action set-pieces, flashbacks and colourful character names. That’s certainly what’s ended up on the screen, thanks to director David Leitch.
David Leitch is the auteur behind such successful but shallow fare as Deadpool 2, Atomic Blonde and John Wicks. His background is stunt work – in fact I believe he first met Pitt as his stunt double in the film Mr and Mrs Smith.
Stunt work gives a director a healthy regard for action sequences – there are a lot of these in Bullet train – if rather less for reasons to put them in.
Anyway, Pitt’s last job is to get hold of a McGuffin – in this case a silver briefcase - and deliver it to a client with the unpromising name of White Death.
It is, he’s assured by Zsa Zsa on the phone, a perfectly easy job.
But in the first of many complications, it seems there’s more than one person on board the Bullet Train who’s been asked to find the briefcase.
In the case of unlikely twins Tangerine and Lemon, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Brian Tyree Henry, they’re also charged with bodyguarding the son of White Death.
A teenage girl, who goes by ‘Prince’ for some reason is also tooled up for a bit of mayhem, along with at least four other briefcase-claimers and assassins.
One of them is a Mexican chap called The Wolf.
So, all these exotic characters are chasing each other up and down the speeding bullet train.
They’re also dodging a collection of cute cameo roles – that’s right, Zsa Zsa’s not the only surprise guest on the Bullet Train – as well as taking every opportunity not to get off at the required next stop.
And to add insult to idiocy, the story keeps stopping to flash back hours, weeks - at one stage 26 years - to explain coincidences that keep saving our hero’s bacon.
This itself is justified – well sort of – by the idea that Bullet Train keeps riffing on the concept of luck. Is Pitt’s Ladybug actually dogged by misfortune, or is he in fact the luckiest man alive?
Bullet Train manages to be both busy and a bit pointless – to coin a phrase “Everything everywhere all at once”. And I have to say I wouldn’t care if it weren’t such a waste of good talent.
Notably Pitt and the mysterious Zsa Zsa Gabor who are far better than the sugar-rush script and rickety direction deserve.
The pair will certainly make money with Bullet Train, but I don’t think they’ll make many friends. After all, there’s more to movies than selling popcorn. You guys have made enough money, surely. Isn’t it time you got off trains like this and went back to work?
