All off-board for this sub-Guy Ritchie clanger in which Pitt plays a gonzo hitman outwitting quirky killers in the service of Sandra Bullock
Let’s hope the estimable Brad Pitt isn’t giving us his leading-man swansong with this weirdly exhausting and overwhelmingly unfunny gonzo-violent action comedy set on a Japanese bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto – with the film’s frantically hyperactive tempo cranked up in homage to the locomotive speed. This film would be an awful way for Pitt’s performance career to hit the buffers and he is given lines like: “He follows me around like … something witty.”
It’s a semi-westwashed version of the bestselling 2010 novel by Japanese author Kotoro Isaka, and directed by David (Deadpool 2) Leitch, all about a bunch of wacky assassins aboard the train, their murderous destinies all chaotically colliding, and all turning out to have more to do with each other than they think.
With the whip-pans and crash zooms, the sudden flashbacks, the voiceovers, stylised punchups, shootings and stabbings and inter titles introducing the zany characters and geezer crims – two of whom are cockneys and serious West Ham fans – this is worryingly like something by Guy Ritchie. (Although Brad Pitt’s eccentric performance as a traveller in Ritchie’s film Snatch is better than anything here.)
Pitt himself, in goofy bucket-hat, nerdy glasses and superannuated surfer dude gear, plays a laidback hitman codenamed “ladybug” whose handler (Sandra Bullock) gives him an easy job, to ease him back into the game after an uproarious series of calamities in previous missions.
