Bullet Train

Tuesday

Peter Tonguette

Bullet Train is an unabashedly manly palette cleanser

David Leitch’s new action movie Bullet Train is noisy, bloody, jokey, highly derivative and, in its plot machinations, positively Delphic. It has the character of a cinematic testosterone injection. Yet, in the Year of Our Lord 2022, when American mass media has been overtaken by a spirit of androgynous wokeness, this unabashedly manly flick works more like a palette cleanser. Based on the novel Maria Beetle by Japanese author Kotaro Isaka, Bullet Train stars Brad Pitt as an American assassin living in Japan. As the picture opens, the executioner has a run of bad luck and wants to get out of the whole shady business.

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Monday

John Ehrett

Bullet Train is a neon-washed delight

Based on the trailers, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Bullet Train was a gritty, serious-minded action thriller in the vein of John Wick. Nothing could be further from the truth: the best way to describe this movie is if Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie co-directed a remake of Murder on the Orient Express. And happily, in the hands of director David Leitch — the talent behind Atomic Blonde and Deadpool 2 — it’s a genre mashup that mostly works. As the film opens, an enigmatic man codenamed “Ladybug” (Brad Pitt) boards one of Japan’s famous “bullet trains,” which travel at high speed and stop at each station for only a single minute. His mission: to recover a mysterious briefcase filled with ransom money and escape before anyone’s the wiser.

bullet train