Bullet Train: A Fun, Stylish Romp

There is something to be said for the mid to late summer action movie that is a perfectly serviceable use of two hours. Not every summer blockbuster needs to be a massive superhero movie or a massive tangle of science fiction tropes, sometimes it is enough for a story to look good and tell a one-off story. Bullet Train fills that role this year because the movie is perfectly fine, maybe a little complex at times while not servicing all the characters equitably, but there is nothing about the movie that is aggressively bad that would make it not worth watching.

The story follows seven assassins (Brad Pitt, Joey King, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Bad Bunny, Brian Tyree Henry, Zazie Beetz, and Andrew Koji) who are all on a bullet train looking for a either a suitcase that contains $10 million, revenge against another passenger or someone in Kyoto, the safe passage of a person on the train, or some combination of the three. All seven of these people are on the train for different reasons that are exposited through flashbacks that can get clunky at times.

The movie is visually sleek and has a certain amount of stylistic flare to it. The use of on-screen graphics elevates the movie and the way that few other movies do and the methodology around flashbacks keep them fresh and interesting. That said, the content of the flashbacks do not always measure up to the character’s role in the movie. At three separate points of the movie, there is backstory given for characters who barely survive into the next scene. When things like this happen during a two-hour long movie, it makes it seem like they only exist to pad out the runtime, especially when there is one other character who could benefit from backstory that is not given any except in the most superficial way, leading to a weird twist in the third act.

The other major issue is something that Bullet Train
has in common with The Batman earlier this year. The third act’s stakes and events feel out of step with everything that happened prior to that point in the movie. While The Batman is largely a noir homage and mostly a mystery movie up until Riddler decides to flood the entire city to create an action set-piece, Bullet Train is largely a mystery/thriller movie with some impressive action sequences until the third act where it becomes a John Wick-esque movie with a massive face-off between the head of an organized crime family and his cronies and the surviving members of the train sequences. It is especially noticeable when during the falling action during a sequence with Ladybug (Pitt) and his handler where it is visibly shot on a massive green screen.

While the options may be slim for local viewers who use AMC A-List in the short-term, this movie is a serviceable use of two hours. The mystery is not particularly deep but the production design is interesting, the dialogue is funny, and the actions sequences are kinetic enough to keep it consistently interesting from beginning to end, even if the movie feels like it has multiple endings.

Final Rating: 7/10