The actor’s comic chops can’t save an ultra-violent crime caper stuffed with self-delighted banter
English film-participants needing idealism will most likely feel a moment pull towards Bullet Train film.
The film unfurls on the Shinkansen to Kyoto, adjusted from the original Maria Beetle by Japanese wrongdoing essayist Kōtarō Isaka
The movie unfold in which a grab-bag of assassins do battle for a briefcase of ransom money.
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Aside from the location and the backing of Sony, only a thin, uneasy cultural identity remains. There are nods to anime, an odd joke about wasabi, a whole sequence centred on a “washlet” toilet.
But the headline cast have been hired for western tastes, led by Brad Pitt as a hapless career criminal on a seemingly straightforward mission.
Board at Tokyo, retrieve case, exit. Afterwards he plans to visit a Zen garden. Sadly, nothing is ever so simple.
The train proves to be filled with other bad guys, each a cartoon cog in an ornate plot that builds to a comic free-for-all.
Britishness comes to the fore with a pair of cockney goons played by Brian Tyree Henry and Aaron Taylor-Johnson.
Taylor-Johnson at least has fun mimicking Tom Hardy in a film that in turn impersonates Guy Ritchie, which is to say it looks like a lager ad from 2003 and is stuffed with self-delighted banter.
Director David Leitch is among the makers of the John Wick movies, a franchise that does flip, neon-lit bloodshed better.
Still, Bullet Train must have made a great pitch, star names and mayhem in the self-contained bubble of a railway journey