The most enjoyable of these rivals are a British pair of brothers referred to as Lemon and Tangerine, their mission-specific nicknames growing more insufferable every time this movie tries to squeeze them for an easy laugh (is all the “fruit” talk gay panic, or does it just fail to amount to anything else?).
It’s just his usual bad luck that he was called to replace someone else for a quick snatch-and-grab job at the last minute, and that virtually every other passenger on the bullet train he boards seems to have an interest in procuring the same briefcase. Maybe he used to be a regular Agent 47, but these days he’s more into killing people with kindness (“You put peace into the world and you get peace back,” he tells the voice in his head). Sporting a humble bucket hat, a raggedy hairstyle that’s a few bad months short of “Seven Years in Tibet”, and a zen attitude that owes more to the Dude than it does a contract killer, Ladybug doesn’t appear much interested in murder. Pitt - codenamed “Ladybug” by an off-screen handler voiced by Sandra Bullock - seems like odd man out. White Death is a third-act surprise, but the reveal is worth the wait).
I suppose that’s in keeping with the spirit of Zak Olkewicz’s intricately dumb screenplay, which twists Isaka’s original story into a crime saga about a gigantic Russian gangster named “White Death,” whose hostile takeover of a yakuza crime syndicate somehow explains why several of the world’s deadliest assassins have all found themselves aboard the same train (the identity of the actor playing Mr. It’s even harder to imagine how it started as a book about Japanese people, as “Bullet Train” - set along the Hayate line railway tracks that run between Tokyo and Kyoto - boasts more white cast members from “The Lost City” than it does locally born major characters.
in Afghanistanīest Movies Never Made: 40 Lost Projects from Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, and More 'Retrograde' Review: An Unflinching Look at the Last Days of the U.S. 'The Whale' Review: Brendan Fraser Is Towering in a Lesser Darren Aronofsky Even though David Leitch’s cotton-candy-and-flop-sweat adaptation of Kōtarō Isaka’s “MariaBeetle” is the kind of Hollywood action movie so mindless and star-driven that it’s almost impossible to imagine how it started as a book. Even though this over-cranked story of strangers on a Shinkansen - a late summer write-off that feels like what might happen if someone typed “Guy Ritchie anime” into DALL-E 2 - tries so hard to mimic Pitt’s natural appeal that you can feel the movie begging for our bemusement with every frenetic cut-away and gratuitous flashback. “Bullet Train” is not a good film, but Pitt is having a truly palpable amount of fun in it, and the energy that radiates off of him as he fights Bad Bunny over an explosive briefcase or styles his hair with the blow dryer function of a Japanese toilet is somehow magnetic enough to convince us that we’re having fun, too. Because that’s the thing about movie stars, and why the last of them still matter in a franchise-mad world where characters tend to be more famous than the people who play them on-screen: They often get minted in good films, but they always get proven in bad ones. If “ Bullet Train” is one of the worst movies that Brad Pitt has ever starred in - better than “Troy,” but a hair short of “The Mexican” - this big shiny nothing of a blockbuster is also a remarkable testament to the actor’s batting average over the last 30 years, and some of the best evidence we have as to why he’s been synonymous with the movies themselves for that entire time.