All aboard the “Bullet Train”! The express from Tokyo to Kyoto has everything, but mostly it has a lot of highly trained assassins with conflicting goals, including a befuddled Brad Pitt as a snatch-n-grab guy dubbed Ladybug, a pair of British bros named Lemon (Brian Tyree Henry) and Tangerine (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a naughty schoolgirl with big ambitions (Joey King), a grieving groom known as The Wolf (Benito A. Martínez Ocasio, aka Bad Bunny), and a woman who works with poisons called The Hornet (Zazie Beetz). Also, there’s a snake, a very venomous snake.
That should keep them all busy for the duration of the journey, over the course of one night, and indeed, director David Leitch never lets this thing slow down for a minute. That is both the glory and the downfall of “Bullet Train,” a glib, slick and shallow slice of Japanophile action entertainment that offers a very bright, shiny surface, but has absolutely no interest in revealing anything beyond that.
Zak Olkewicz adapted the screenplay from Japanese crime novelist Kotaro Isaka’s 2010 book “Maria Beetle,” and he brings a playful, ironic tone to the screenplay, which is fast, dense and deceptively simple underneath all the pandemonium. All you need to know is that Ladybug is supposed to get a briefcase, Lemon and Tangerine need to guard the briefcase, and there are many people who want the briefcase. This group rocks-n-rolls, bloodily, up, down, in, out and around the train in order to put their hands on that hunk of Samsonite, and in the end, we will all wonder: was it worth it?
