"BULLET TRAIN" (2022) #bradpitt #kyoto #japan #movies #moviereview

Everything you’ve seen, read or heard about Bullet Train is true: It’s loud, brash, bloodily brutal and if not quite as repeatedly funny as the filmmakers would like you to believe, they’ve drawn some eclectic and entertaining characters who are seemingly thrown together on a sparsely populated train headed at high speed for Kyoto, Japan. Considering 95% of the film is contained within a 16 carriage speeding train, the fight/stunt scenes are incredible, some major deaths a surprise, a minor unnamed cameo too and by the time the film’s out of control FUBAR denouement is signalled by a Japanese version of Bonnie Tyler’s “Holding Out For a Hero”, I rather hope you’ll be smiling from ear to ear and going along for the ride.

Here’s something you may not have read about this film: the titular star and evergreen handsome man Brad Pitt doesn’t have as big a role in the film as you’d perhaps imagine, and that’s to the credit of and a compliment to the director, David Leitch. Pitt rather bookends the film and this is again a compliment to the director and his screenplay writer Zak Olkewicz as well drawn and thorough a character as portrayed by Pitt is, he’s surrounded by a plethora of characters that all demand screen time and dominate when they have it. Pitt’s character is the central cog around which the film turns, a kind of born again stoner assassin who after therapy spurns guns in favour of life preserving hand to hand combat sure, but also wishes to spread the good word of recovery! “Give peace out. Get peace back in”, or “So quick to anger. So quick to blame” or indeed even within the fight scenes themselves “Let this be a lesson of the toxicity of anger”. A born again assassin may be pushing it, or has Pitt’s character simply given into the twists and turns of “fate”, a central theme of the film as a whole as well as a word repeated almost as often as two other regularly used words here beginning with the letter f?

The above two paragraphs are taken from my spoiler free review of "Bullet Train" I originally penned and published to my Medium blog site on 30th August 2022 and which can be read in full and for free (please do consider subscribing for free too!) via my Substack blog account linked immediately below:

https://ramblingmusings666.substack.com/p/bullet-train-2022-810c97fc863

This spoiler free review also features within volume 1 of my 7 volumes of "essential film reviews collection" (£4.99 per volume) or you can read any and every volume for free should you have an Amazon Kindle "Unlimited" package:

Volume 1:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0C4HHDL56

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