Bullet Train feels a bit like Guy Ritchie’s Snatch as envisioned by half of the team that brought to life John Wick, with a sprinkling of the convoluted plotting and colorful characters of Joe Carnahan’s Smokin’ Aces. But as much as I like each of those individual pieces, something about the final product of David Leitch’s Bullet Train simply doesn’t work: the endless flashbacks throw the pacing slightly off, which in turn leads to several inert stretches in a movie that should move as swiftly as the titular conveyance.
Ladybug (Brad Pitt) is tasked with hopping onto a train, snatching a very particular briefcase, and hopping off the train again. In the course of trying to grab this briefcase, he’ll be confronted with a grieving father (Andrew Koji) and that father’s father...