The first 10-15 minutes of this film are remarkably off-putting.
We’re dumped into the midst of a story in progress, with numerous characters muttering sotto voce dialogue that gets buried beneath a shrieking pop score soundtrack. A gory and unpalatable flashback illuminates a running argument between two posh assassins over whether they’ve thus far killed 16 or 17 people.
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| Ladybug (Brad Pitt, left) believes that he has made an easy score, when he quickly locates the metal briefcase he's been hired to snatch. Then he encounters Wolf (Benito A Martinez Ocasio), merely the first of numerous assassins on this bullet train run from Tokyo to Kyoto. |
Honestly, you’ll be tempted to bail …
… but that would be a mistake.
Once this film settles into its groove — and, more importantly, once viewers embrace that groove — this stylish, gleefully violent romp is a lot of fun.
Due in great part to Pitt’s increasingly amusing “Who, me?” performance.
Director David Leitch’s heavily stylized, unapologetically brutal thriller is a mash-up of Guy Ritchie-style crime romps and bloodthirsty Japanese yakuza epics, replete with wrathful assassins who go by code names, and have various scores to settle. Pitt’s character — dubbed “Ladybug” for the purposes of this snatch-and-grab assignment — swans not-quite-helplessly through this increasingly lethal chaos: the ultimate (comparative) innocent in the wrong place at the wrong time.
He has been tasked with retrieving a certain metal briefcase on the Töhoku Shinkansen Hayate bullet train run between Tokyo and Kyoto. It should be simple: Find the briefcase, depart the train at its next stop, liaise with his unseen handler.
What poor Ladybug doesn’t know — what we also don’t know, and learn only in fits and starts, as he does — is that the case is in the possession of the useless, wayward son (Logan Lerman) of White Death (Michael Shannon), a reclusive and much-feared Russian kingpin within the international crime scene.
White Wolf’s son is being chaperoned by professional killers Tangerine (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Lemon (Brian Tyree Henry). The former is a Savile dandy with slicked-back hair and a penchant for erudite, long-winded speeches; the latter has a guileless demeanor and an uncanny ability to “read” people honed from (I’m not making this up) a lifelong study of Thomas the Tank Engine.
Ah, but this is a very busy train. The passengers also include Kimura (Andrew Koji), an alcoholic, low-level Tokyo criminal who has hit rock-bottom after failing to stop the unknown culprit who shoved his young son off the roof of a tall building. With family honor at stake, Kimura has concocted a mad scheme that will put him face-to-face with his target.
Then there’s Wolf (Benito A Martinez Ocasio), a rage-fueled assassin with a score to settle against Ladybug; The Hornet (Zazie Beetz), a master of disguise with a lethal sting, who travels beneath the radar of every job she accepts; and Prince (Joey King), a seemingly angelic young woman whose sweet looks and tender voice conceal torturous tendencies.
Oh, and let’s not forget the boomslang, a highly dangerous snake stolen from the Tokyo Zoo, whose highly toxic venom causes victims to bleed out from every bodily orifice within 90 seconds.
And off we go…
As it happens, Ladybug finds the briefcase almost immediately. Subsequently keeping it — and getting off the train — prove rather more difficult.
The various motives and histories emerge piece-meal via fleeting flashbacks: at first seemingly unconnected, but ultimately audaciously linked via Zak Olkewicz’s fiendishly twisty script, which is adapted from Kôtarô Isaka’s darkly comedic 2010 thriller, Maria Beetle.
The subsequent gallows humor derives both from Pitt’s performance — as an intuitive and skilled, but burnt-out operative burdened by what he perceives as a relentless string of bad luck — and the absurdity of vicious skirmishes that pause briefly for meditative discussions of fate; or because the train’s oblivious personnel wander through a given car; or (in one case) because the combatants wind up in the “quiet car,” where disapproving passengers repeatedly shush their frantic efforts to kill each other.
Actually, Ladybug isn’t interested in killing anybody, but he does wish to stay alive. Alas, everybody else seems to want to kill him, which repeatedly harshes his Zen-like vibe.
The relentless, good-natured bickering between Tangerine and Lemon is quite amusing; Taylor-Johnson and Henry make it clear that, surface prickliness aside, these two would die for each other. King, apparently determined to carve out a fresh career as a bad-ass femme fatale, blends faux wholesomeness with an unsettling delight in making others suffer.
(Ironic, though, that her character would be dubbed Prince, mere months after she starred as the title character in the similarly vicious The Princess.)
The cast also includes a few surprise guest stars, whose identities shall not be revealed here.
Here’s a cute detail: A bullet train trip from Tokyo to Kyoto takes precisely 128 minutes … the exact length of this film.
This hyper-stylized romp is insanely choreographed by Leitch and editor Elísabet Ronaldsdóttir, and I cannot imagine the storyboarding that went into all of these frantic action sequences. Leitch knows this territory well, having previously worked on John Wick, Atomic Blonde and Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw. He’s blessed this time with a better — and much more clever — script than what those earlier popcorn bombs offered.
Production designer David Scheunemann has a field day with the various train interiors, most notably the brightly colored “family car,” decked out in a hot pink explosion of animé “Momomon” characters. This paralyzingly garish tableau is even scarier than some of this story’s assassins, and even includes a fluffy, full-size Momomon character who interacts with kids and their parents.
And just when you think things couldn’t possibly get crazier, Leitch and Olkewicz uncork an eye-popping, dog-nuts finale that is Off. The. Charts.
This sort of unapologetically gory, limb-severing mayhem obviously isn’t for the faint of heart, but — given the outré genre involved — it’s difficult to imagine anything better.
As previously mentioned, the opening scenes are a poor introduction to what follows; it also would have been nice if Leitch if dialed down Dominic Lewis’ strident score and the equally ear-piercing pop tunes. But these are minor quibbles.
In all other respects, this is the guiltiest of guilty pleasures.
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