Cinema - Bullet Train will have you wishing for a rail strike...

Bullet Train (15), (126 mins), Cineworld Cinemas.
Brad Pitt stars in the action thriller Bullet Train. Photo: Scott GarfieldBrad Pitt stars in the action thriller Bullet Train. Photo: Scott Garfield
Brad Pitt stars in the action thriller Bullet Train. Photo: Scott Garfield

If you are ever going to miss a train, let it be this one – a fairly dire couple of hours of comedy thriller made all the worse by the fact that clearly it thinks it is utterly hilarious. It really, really isn’t.

A low point comes early on when a couple of assassins start squabbling about just how many people they killed on their last job. To settle it, they relive their greatest hits – to the soundtrack of Engelbert Humperdinck singing I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles. Marginally worse perhaps is the moment towards the end when Brad Pitt delivers a series of supposedly witty one-liners to someone bleeding to death. Oh what laughs we had…

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It’s all part of what makes Bullet Train so tediously tasteless, the sheer casualness of the violence it dishes out in its clever-clever way. You know the kind of thing… two characters blithely chatting about something else to each other as they hack and slash their way through their hapless oncoming attackers.

Based on the Japanese novel Maria Beetle by Kotaro Isaka, the film is delivered in comic book style – which is probably its justification for its grossness. The gist is that five assassins find themselves on a fast-moving bullet train from Tokyo to Morioka with only a few stops in between. We haven’t really got a clue what they are up to and neither, seemingly, do they.

And what an annoying bunch they are, particularly Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Tangerine and Brian Tyree Henry as Lemon. It’s as if the writers were set the challenge: dream up the most irritating double act that has ever disgraced the screen. They certainly hit the jackpot with Tangerine and Lemon, their names typical of the level at which Bullet Train sets its humour.

And then the film starts to do something even more irritating still. It starts to get quite good as all the hidden connections start to emerge, the family links, the family feuds, the family revenges. It seems it does all somehow add up to something and there is even the odd flourish as the bullet train, having been brought to a stop, hurtles out of control as everyone turns on everyone else for the final few minutes of carnage. The film’s style is dislikeable, but maybe towards the end you can see that there is certainly a style there.

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But in the end, all you can really do is marvel at the immensity of the effort that has gone into it all, the scale, the imagination, the massive amount of planning, commitment and energy – and wonder why the returns are just so meagre, particularly given the talent concerned. Part of the frustration of the film is that it feels as if it is desperately trying to do a Tarantino while mostly falling completely flat; part too of the frustration is the talent involved. Brad Pitt wanders through it doing the kinds of things that would probably succeed for him elsewhere. Here they are doomed. And Sandra Bullock, has she ever been so woefully underused and misused. However there is one little cameo that works, Channing Tatum in briefly the film’s funniest moment.

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