Bullet Train, review: fun and crazy like Deadpool on the Thomas train

Bullet Train, review

"Destiny" is the perfect word to sum up Bullet Train, the latest film by David Leitch: better not try to stop the flow of destiny, because if you do, you could find yourself run over by a bullet train. Better sit in the carriage and enjoy the ride, right? "Destiny" is also a recurring word in a film that apparently proposes itself as a mad race through Japan, between killers, jokes, blood and numerous stereotypes of action movies, but in reality it seems to aspire to something more. And perhaps this is his great flaw. Perhaps. Here's what we think of the most choreographic, colorful and "atomic (blond)" show by one of the most action-packed directors of the moment.

You can't fight Destiny. Unless…

As anticipated, David Leitch has placed a great theme in Bullet Train, consequently a great responsibility: he has given him a sense of destiny as a gift. All its protagonists are linked by the red thread of destiny, starting with the character of Brad Pitt, nothing more than a sort of criminal with the code name Ladybug. He himself seems haunted by an unfortunate fate, given that he must replace a colleague in a mission that will prove to be anything but simple, finding himself aboard the "bullet train", or the shinkansen, in the company of lethal killers. A crazy, acrobatic race with twists is expected, from Tokyo to Kyoto at more than 300 kilometers per hour.

Destiny is between the first and second class, but he is not an easy character to deal with: before Bullet Train, above all the greatest stories had to deal with us, starting with the Lord of the Rings, Avatar, the Gladiator up to Star Wars. How can such a protagonist fit into 16 shinkansen wagons? It seems to clash with the action and violently pop soul promised since the first Bullet Train trailers. And we tell you right away: it is so indeed. The proposed plot, inspired by Kōtarō Isaka's best-selling novel, The Seven Killers of the Shinkansen, seems at some point to derail, precisely because of fate. The narrative choice of wanting to push so much on the motivations of the characters, on why fate has placed them on those tracks, with a thriller / yellow tone in order to give them depth and / or morale, diverts attention from the gaudy and funny one. patina made with katanas and bullets. The end result is an ineffective script in a film with so much action and if you pay too much attention, you end up disoriented. And you miss the train.

Chekhov's snake

Remember Anton Chekhov and what he said about the twists? "If a gun appears in a novel, must it shoot"? Here, once again, is the concept of destiny. But this form of randomness was beautifully rendered in Bullet Train. Everything fits and rotates within the film precisely following Chekhov's order: a character appears, he will have to do something and this is valid for everything, objects, guns, bottles of water and snakes included. As the narrative continues, we witness the stories and related evolutions of the protagonists. If their motivations do not convince or they themselves are not dramatic enough, at least the narrative choice that intertwines them with each other, fitting and colliding them, delights the viewer without making him too bored. Always if you weren't really looking for a busy movie. But from a film with Brad Pitt talking about Japanese toilets, with Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Brian Tyree Henry discussing why they are respectively called Tangerine and Lemon, with a long dialogue about the Thomas train, you didn't really expect a film that is too "serious. ". Right?

Ciak, Fight, Action!

If we start from that initial assumption of wanting to attend the show without problems, without questions, stop, relax in the armchair, ready to attend action and blood prohibited to children under 14, then yes we have fun. Pure action, the (lethal) touch of those who have directed, produced and moved some of the most beautiful action movies of the last twenty years: in Bullet Train you can see the fruits of David Leitch's experience as a stuntman in Fight Club, Ocean's Eleven, Buffy, Daredevil, Matrix and 300, and the action is not only in the martial arts, in the strokes and in the well-paced choreography, but you can see it above all in the neon colors to Deadpool 2 and in the nuances of the characters to John Wick, with that unspoken saying, I see I don't see.