Bul­let Train

It’s easy enough for a film crit­ic to type out the words ​“deriv­a­tive of Taran­ti­no,” lace their fin­gers, give them a good crack­ing, and con­tent­ed­ly lean back in their swivel­ing desk chair. But Bul­let Train, the lat­est beat-‘em-up from David Leitch (one half of the brain trust respon­si­ble for John Wick, which bequeaths this film its gun-fu moves and affec­tion­ate Ori­en­tal­ism), makes show­ing the work much sim­pler than usual.

There’s real­ly no oth­er way to describe the smart-aleck irrev­er­ence to which Leitch aspires in spite of a moldi­ness that’s only grown bluer and fuzzi­er since the late ​‘90s. Per­haps he the­o­rized that enough time has gone by since the hey­day of Pulp Fic­tion and Reser­voir Dogs that no one would notice his shame­less ran­sack­ing of their play­book, from a philo­soph­i­cal hit­man attempt­ing to walk a right­eous path, to bick­er­ing between part­nered crooks about who gets which code­name, to a crim­i­nal unspool­ing a world­view informed by an unlike­ly pop-cul­ture reference. 

These zomb­i­fied clichés lurch back to life in fright­ful new forms, drain­ing the humor from a film that spends its long stretch­es of buildup rely­ing on it. Instead of Sam Jack­son quot­ing Caine from Kung Fu, we get Brad Pitt spout­ing self-help plat­i­tudes as if everyone’s just now heard about this newish ​‘ther­a­py’ rack­et. The ban­ter between the var­i­ous col­or-cod­ed Mis­ters has giv­en way to a wit­less back-and-forth between tough guys named after fruits, mak­ing a view­er long for the some­what more accom­plished ripoffs from ear­ly Guy Ritchie. And in place of the immor­tal ​“Like a Vir­gin” dia­logue, there’s an insuf­fer­able run­ning joke about Thomas the Tank Engine (a show for babies, enjoyed here by a grown man!) that’s most­ly just run into the ground. 

Broad incon­gruities and inex­plic­a­ble cameos — this movie makes the fatal pre­sump­tion that a sur­prise appear­ance from Ryan Reynolds is a good thing audi­ences want to see hap­pen — take the place of jokes as snatch-and-grab artist Lady­bug (Pitt, his innate charm locked in bit­ter war with the thor­ough­ly charm­less writ­ing) makes his way up and down a Tokyo-to-Kyoto train that requires one entire night to com­plete a two-hour trip. He’s here to pur­loin a suit­case, a sim­ple task com­pli­cat­ed by a snake on the loose and an eccen­tric coterie of guns-for-hire (a scat­tered ensem­ble includ­ing Joey King, Aaron Tay­lor-John­son, Bri­an Tyree Hen­ry, Ben­i­to ​“Bad Bun­ny” Martínez Oca­sio, and Zazie Beetz) who’d all like to kill him. 

This gallery of rogues, when not defined by their fleet­ing one-day-on-set pres­ence (in the case of Oca­sio and Beetz) or British accents bad enough to be pun­ish­able by law (King and Hen­ry), can be reduced to the sum of their affec­ta­tions. Cos­tumes, wigs, and gim­micks attempt to pro­vide the sub­stance of char­ac­ter, and the cast’s effort to pick up the slack with ham­my per­for­mances reveals only that they’re not in the class of actor adept at doing that. (Unlike Michael Shan­non, who shows up late and leaves ear­ly in a role that was clear­ly meant for and should have gone to Nico­las Cage.)

Like the hyper-aero­dy­nam­ic train slip­ping through the night, the fight pas­sages that should be the film’s sav­ing grace come out tex­ture­less and fric­tion­less. Rapid-fire edits dis­tort the con­tained spa­tial con­sis­ten­cy that should make bru­tal poet­ry of hand-to-hand com­bat in the cramped tube of an econ­o­my car. These sequences are all dig­i­tal­ly enhanced mon­ey shots, run­ning roughshod over the unri­valed tal­ent for fight chore­og­ra­phy that Leitch has more than proven in the past.

The bal­let of a beat­ing gets lost in its bela­bored imi­ta­tions of retro cool, most glar­ing in the intro­duc­to­ry title cards giv­ing each char­ac­ter a splashy, annoy­ing entry. This, too, comes from the stunt­ing desire to be Taran­ti­no and to emu­late his clever slick­ness. Though there isn’t much in here that doesn’t seem recy­cled, whether from the likes of QT clones like Guy Ritchie or the many, many Wick-lite action pic­tures that have exhaust­ed this sub­genre over the past few years. The cocked-eye­brow smug­ness-as-com­e­dy, the facile rela­tion­ship to Japan­ese cul­tur­al sig­ni­fiers mas­querad­ing as homage, the inter­change­able pink-and-blue col­or palettes — the whole thing’s run out of steam. 

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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