There’s some sense that Bullet Train is going through the motions of smashing two different genres together–ensemble cast shoot ’em ups, like Free Fire (2016) or The Gentlemen (2019) or (sigh, forgive me) Gunpowder Milkshake (2021) with train movies, like Snowpiercer (2013) and Train to Busan (2016).
In some ways, I think Bullet Train is already situated in a tradition of mashup genre ensemble movies like Highrise (2016), which took itself too seriously, and attempted to capitalize on the success of Snowpiercer to disastrous result, evidenced by the fact that you had to look up what Highrise was and wondered at how Tom Hiddleston, at the height of his Taylor Swift-Crimson Peak power, was unable to attract more than $4 million US to the theater. If you tried to sell Tom Hiddleston’s old socks after Loki last year you would’ve made more than that. For chrissakes, here’s a photo of them together.
What in the actual fuck could have gone so wrong with Highrise to make it that unpleasant to watch? So here we find ourselves. Reflecting on Bullet Train, the not so original marketing ploy to trick people into seeing a movie where a bunch of famous and semi-famous people beat the shit out of each other. At this point, it seems worth mentioning that David Leitch got his directing debut as a co-director in 2014 with John Wick. (Director David Leitch is someone whose work I have dutifully ignored for almost a decade, mostly to my own detriment, it seems. John Wick is a movie I have studiously avoided for many years for no reason other than I was probably busy the weekend it came out and never bothered to look it up and then the sequel came out and it became too intimidating to try to catch up?)
Bullet Train does all it promises but it does it a little more tongue-in-cheek and deadpan than you were expecting. Leitch directs a movie that asks, What if Wes Anderson wanted to do a film about a bunch of assassins meeting on a train to look for a MacGuffin? And also, what if a movie didn’t have any anxiety about going very, very long on a joke, like, say, an hour long treasure chest of a joke involving a snake on the loose? What if Family Guy made a live action film but then replaced all the pop culture references with obscure psychobabble affirmations and children’s programming lessons from the 1980s?
“They don’t have to make any more movies,” Friend said. Friend added, “Tarantino wishes he had made that film.” There is so much joy contained within this vapid, bait action film: Brian Tyree Henry and his costar Aaron Taylor-Johnson shine as the Twins with their rapid fire chatter and the casting for the rest of the ensemble collects a bunch of delightful character actors from a basket of beloved, now-canceled cult classic television shows of this past decade. The formula is gold and it’s unfortunate that, as Friend says, there is no need to make movies anymore.
