Bullet Train: not as smart as it pretends to be

Nolan James
Editor-in-Chief

*review contains spoilers

David Leitch’s Bullet Train starts insufferably and evolves to entertaining mediocrity by its conclusion. 

Leitch is best known for directing Atomic Blonde and Deadpool 2, the latter of which is smart and funny, for the most part. 

With Bullet Train, however, Leitch proves that he lacks even an ounce of the intelligence and skill of the directors he blatantly copies.

Brad Pitt stars as Ladybug, an assassin whose unlucky nature often ironically benefits his career. Pitt is the highlight of the movie, which otherwise features embarrassingly over-the-top, forced performances from normally skilled actors who were clearly misdirected.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s performance is hit the worst by the lackluster writing and directing with his smug, overbearing dialogue. The movie is completely unfun whenever he is on screen, and his exit for the last third of the film is where it starts to pick up a bit. 

As for the story—the complex murder-mystery the film sets up is unceremoniously dropped, and completely uninteresting anyway. The overarching themes of luck and fate are so shallow that only a seventh grade English class could bother trying to analyze them, and would probably hate themselves while doing it. 

Unfortunately, the director does not seem to realize just how vapid his film is given how hard the themes are pushed to the audience. They were obvious within the first 10 minutes of the film.

To the film’s credit, the cinematography is often beautiful and the editing is certainly more varied and stylized than most of its contemporaries. Unfortunately, it obviously steals from the films of Quentin Tarantino, and without his thoughtfulness. Tarantino could make a conversation about burgers or some other non-issue entertaining; Leitch could not. 

The other issue with the editing is that the film does not know when to stop. Things are told out of order and the style is overly gaudy, and for no good reason other than trying to lure the audience through meaningless aesthetics. A lot more discretion could have and should have been used.

The final act of the film is better, with decent performances by Michael Shannon and Hiroyuki Sanada helping pick things up. Not that the ending saves the film, though, because it does not.

It can be fun at times, but Bullet Train lacks substance—a buffet where whatever is at home is probably the better option.

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