Bullet Train
The song of Tarantino is still being sung
Bullet Train (2022)
3 / 5
After Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction blew up American cinema in the 1990s, an avalanche of imitators rushed to capitalize on what could be called a new subgenre: Tarantinoesque Action. There are a few hallmarks of this type of film. You need a big cast, with one or more characters sporting an unusual name. You need one or more characters to have an extended conversation about some other pop culture artifact, drawing from that artifact metaphorical lessons they apply to the action of their current situation. You need a flashback-laden narrative flow that makes the forward motion of the plot less of a straight line and more of a cursive signature. And you need to punctuate the film with bursts of visceral, almost cartoonishly gleeful, violence.
Bullet Train is the latest arrival in this subgenre niche, hits all these notes, and has huge fun doing it. Brad Pitt plays Ladybug (ding!), a quirky hitman who boards a Japanese bullet train to swipe a mysterious briefcase. The case is in the care of two sarcastic British thugs, Lemon and Tangerine (ding!) one of whom is especially fond of viewing the people he meets through the lens of Thomas the Tank Engine character archetypes (ding!). Ladybug comes to realize that the briefcase is part of a very complicated web of plot threads (ding!) involving at least half a dozen other flamboyant killers (ding!) who are either already on the train or will be coming aboard very soon, and don’t have any qualms about stabbing, shooting, or poisoning (ding!) anyone who interferes with them.
The film is a symphony of profanity and violence (so yeah, this isn’t a movie for kids), but everyone involved is having a great time playing things broad and chewing the scenery. It’s grown-up popcorn fun, and totally worth seeing on a big theater screen with big theater sound, but it’s also one of those movies that you’re probably not going to need to see twice.
3 stars of 5: I really enjoyed it, but it’s pretty disposable.