Brad Pitt might be one of our biggest and most enduring movie stars, but 30-odd years into his fame it's just possible that he doesn't get enough credit for the detail – and most importantly, sense of humour – that he brings to his roles.
From his star-making breakout in Thelma & Louise onwards, he's made a pretty good fist of parodying the leading man ideal, using his dreamy looks as a slippery weapon – think back to his camp, whiny immortal in Interview with the Vampire; his harebrained personal trainer in Burn After Reading; or his leathery, laconic stunt guy in Once Upon A Time in… Hollywood. (Serious Brad is never nearly as good; he's a character actor trapped in a leading man mould.)
At 58, Pitt is in the autumn of his blissful idiocy, and it's a blessing – even if the movies aren't always a match for his gifts. After stealing the fun but clunky The Lost City – in what amounted to an extended cameo, playing an absurdly macho CIA operative – he's back to headline David Leitch's new action movie Bullet Train, and he just might be the only thing keeping this frenetic but feeble ride on the tracks.
Looking perfectly ridiculous – and somehow impossibly cool – in a bucket hat and dopey glasses, Pitt plays an unlucky hit man codenamed Ladybug, who finds himself in Tokyo, strutting to a Japanese pop cover of Stayin' Alive and bound for the bullet train at the behest of his unseen handler who doubles as his part-time therapist (Sandra Bullock, quite literally phoning it in).
A reformed thug of sorts, Ladybug has recently emerged from some kind of zen retreat that has him spouting goofy self-help mantras – "You put peace out in the world, you get peace back" – that play right into Pitt's speciality of fusing the silly with the sublime.
On board the train, Ladybug has to snatch a suitcase full of cash from a pair of assassins straight out of a Guy Ritchie movie – Tangerine (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, sporting a douchey moustache and doing his best Ray Winstone) and Lemon (Brian Tyree Henry, having fun with all the silly accents he must have absorbed on the last, London-set season of Atlanta).
There's also a deranged assassin cosplaying as a schoolgirl (Joey King), a flamboyant hit man known as The Wolf (pop superstar Bad Bunny), and the shadowy, shapeshifting killer Hornet (Zazie Beetz).
That's a lot of gaijin on this train, and a lot of convoluted plot for a movie that essentially amounts to a bunch of people trying to kill each other in close quarters. The exposition no doubt stems from screenwriter Zak Olkewicz (Fear Street: Part Two – 1978) filleting Kōtarō Isaka's character-packed source novel, and it seems to weigh down Leitch's natural aptitude for hard, pummelling violence – this is an extremely talky movie, too often at the expense of simply letting the action run riot like an out-of-control locomotive.
As one of the co-directors, alongside Chad Stahelski, of 2014's John Wick, Leitch helped reinvigorate a certain kind of lean, mean, stunt-based action movie in the age of superhero green screen, but his solo efforts behind the camera (Atomic Blonde; Hobbs & Shaw) have mostly failed to impress – only 2018's Deadpool 2, energised by Ryan Reynolds's motormouth schtick, managed to combine the director's neck-snapping violence and trash-culture ephemera with a degree of success.
With its rote mix of hard violence, pop-culture-obsessed hit men and ironic needle-drops – there are bloody, slow-mo fights to everything from J-Pop covers to Englebert Humperdinck – Bullet Train is directly in the not-very-auspicious lineage of Tarantino rip-offs that flourished in the 90s. Typical of the film's bits: Tyree Henry's Lemon is obsessed with Thomas the Tank engine, a children's program upon which he's based his whole hit man philosophy.
Could the Guy Ritchie renaissance be upon us, like the return of Y2K pop and the uncanny smoothness of Madonna's forehead?
This collision of the cutesy and the ultra-violent will, of course, result in Pitt punching an anime mascot – strangely, one of the few things the movie seems to regard as significantly emblematic of Japanese culture.
But really, beyond some small parts for Japanese actors (Twilight Samurai star Hiroyuki Sanada appears as a beleaguered patriarch) and some external CGI shots, the movie may as well have taken place on the 3:30 from Sydney to Wollongong – there's so little texture and dynamism afforded to the bullet train, to its speed and sleekness as it streaks toward Kyoto, that the action feels studio-bound.
It's the movie star that saves the day.
The little details that Pitt extracts from his predicament – his expression of delight as a smart toilet fan unexpectedly blow-dries his flowing locks, or his dopey demeanour as he's hurled through the carriage of a crashing train – are almost enough to keep the movie humming, or at least make you wish it were a lot better.
Tellingly, the movie's best moment of chemistry arrives near the end, when Pitt and Bullock finally get to share that face-to-face moment so misleadingly sold in the trailers. The dialogue is forgettable, but these two old hands sell it through the force of their presence – a reminder that we still need movie stars to sell us junk; the good ones can even make it nutritious.
Bullet Train is in cinemas now.
