In short: Bullet Train (2022)

Half a dozen characters of the violent criminal persuasion converge on the same bullet train in Japan. Their diverse missions turn out to have rather more connective tissue than they are first led to believe, so it’s a good time to team up and betray or murder one another in various, changing constellations, while the laws of physics turn increasingly optional.

One could snark about how few Japanese people seem to populate the criminal underworld of the Japan of David Leitch’s adaptation of a Japanese novel by Kotaro Isaka that features rather less white people. But then, I find it difficult to argue with a film that casts Brad Pitt as the Big Lebowski of killers, and has quite as much fun pitting him and the other comical grotesqueries populating the film against each other as this one has.

Like most of Leitch’s other films, this wants to be action cinema as POP! (a curiously British feeling idea of POP! for a guy from Wisconsin to boot); unlike most of Leitch’s other films, it actually achieves this goal with a kind of gleeful enthusiasm that I can hardly read as anything but a pure joy at creating cinema that’s absolutely free from all pressures to be serious and thereby can feel curiously freeing and subversive. Bullet Train clearly knows all the rules of character building and plot structure, when and how a film is supposed to use flashbacks, how much an action scene is allowed to break the laws of physics and logic. Having realized them, it then goes about very consciously breaking all of them in clever (sometimes clever-dumb) ways that’ll either leave an audience cheering, giggling madly, or throwing tomatoes at the screen. I found myself on the side of the gigglers here, more than a bit astonished about how seeming randomness can feel free and freeing when applied with as much thought as it is here.