‘Bullet Train’

The song​  we hear at the beginning of David Leitch’s film Bullet Train is the Bee Gees’ ‘Stayin’ Alive’. It’s a good song and all too relevant, but by the time the movie’s plot gets rolling it sounds more like a fragile wish than any sort of programme. ‘Fate is a name for my bad luck,’ a leading character says. Or his good luck. At the end, he and his friend walk through a section of Kyoto wrecked by an out-of-control train – there was no engineering fault, it was just that the crew and most of the passengers were dead, and none of the survivors knew how to work the brakes – and as they approach her car, a telegraph pole falls on it and crushes it. If they had reached the car a minute earlier, they would have been dead too.

He is Brad Pitt and she is Sandra Bullock, so we know why they are alive: they are in a higher fame bracket than the other actors. But if we think of life rather than cinema, or of the imagined life within the film, we have other questions, of course. Who is the scriptwriter? Or if we don’t believe in gods, what kind of scriptwriter is this?

Pitt is a crime-worker returning to his job, and from the start of the film Bullock is giving him instructions by phone. The job is supposedly simple: he is to pick up a briefcase on a train and deliver it to the right place. His therapist has made a new man of him, keen to look on the bright side (the Monty Python allusion isn’t made in the film, but it comes to mind anyway). He talks about peace and ‘the toxicity of anger’, and says: ‘Every job I do, somebody dies. I’m not that guy anymore.’ Bullock says: ‘I think you might be forgetting what you do for a living.’ He is forgetting, even at the end, but the film could hardly be more strenuous in its reminders.

For a start the briefcase is in the care of a pair of old enemies of his, also on the train and in charge not only of this treasure but of a gang boss’s son. They have rescued the young man from a kidnapping, and what’s in the case is the unpaid ransom. Within minutes of the train leaving Tokyo, they have lost the case and the son is dead, so they are out of a job, or rather the only job left to them is … staying alive. They are a comic duo called Lemon and Tangerine, played with great relish by Brian Tyree Henry and Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Their stylistic home is more like Sesame Street than Monty Python. As you will gather, this film is not looking for tonal consistency. The two men are much given to violent, insulting argument – they can’t agree, for example, on how many people they have killed: is it sixteen or seventeen? – but they are also deeply attached to each other, especially whenever either one thinks his comrade is dead. They are called twins, are perhaps brothers, or maybe just long-time pals.

The train has a conductor and a stewardess, and a handful of passengers who are not part of the film’s plot, all of them there so that our active characters have to pretend now and then, with deep improbability, that they are not trying to kill anyone, especially in the so-called quiet car. And there are two more figures with criminal intent. There is a man whose son we have seen in a hospital, possibly dying, because someone pushed him off a high roof. The man, Kimura, played by Andrew Koji, feels that his neglect of his son allowed this to happen. He has been informed that the person who pushed the boy is on the train; he is out to kill this person, or to go as far towards this end as his depression and alcoholism will allow. He doesn’t do a whole lot except get bullied by the professionals. And then there is Prince, almost the only woman in this set-up, very well played by Joey King, who looks like a harmless, slightly over-age schoolgirl, complete with smart skirt and tie, and has an air of innocence that convinces us at once that she may be the most dangerous figure on the train. We don’t know what her mission is until late in the film but we are not surprised to learn she is the daughter of the arch-capo of this world, a Russian known as White Death, played by Michael Shannon.

So what happens to this assembly? Well, having set up some tricky plot possibilities, the film loses all interest in them for quite a while, concentrating on ragged violence instead. Mainly people beat each other up, grabbing whatever hard metallic objects are at hand. This is pretty tiresome, unless you go to the cinema specifically to see such lurid imitations of action. There is also quite a bit of other sub-Bond stuff: the man who jumps on the roof of the moving train, the killer with a fixation on Thomas the Tank Engine, the band of gothic gangsters waiting at every station. Still, this allows space for a lot of flashbacks, which give us bits of background on the characters. The most compelling of these is the Wolf, played by the rapper Bad Bunny, who is shown starting out on his gangster career in Mexico, moving up through the ranks of a drug cartel, only to see his boss and the Wolf’s new wife poisoned at their wedding. He thinks Brad Pitt was the poisoner – it’s true that he was at the wedding – and the Wolf is on the train to try and kill him. But he’s off on both counts: Pitt wasn’t and he can’t. There is one truly surprising character, apparently conjured up by the thought of poison: a large, long snake with no particular mission. Pitt in his humanitarian mode wrestles it into a toilet, writing ‘Snake: Do Not Open’ on the seat lid.

Critics have seen Bullet Train as a failed attempt at a Tarantino movie, and you can see why. The intended homage is probably real, particularly if we think of Pitt in Inglourious Basterds, but here the drift seems quite different. Fantasies of crime, especially unruly ones, often have ideas of order and control at their heart, a reach of power we rarely have in ordinary existence. This is the way Michael Corleone, from his commanding point of view, thinks: ‘If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it’s that you can kill anyone.’ Bullet Train is saying, I think, in its chaotic way and with its talk of fate and luck, something like: ‘If anything in this life is certain, it’s that nothing in this life is certain.’

Another interesting aspect of the film is that it can’t imagine anything outside of crime – there is no civilian life, so to speak. However far we go into parallel stories and flashbacks – to Bolivia, in one case, and 26 years ago – there is no escape from the gang. Everyone is some kind of member, and the system of syndicates is worldwide. (The chief enemy of White Death isn’t Russian or American but Japanese.) This is an old, hyperbolic claim, often associated with Sicily and New Jersey. Think of the corpse in the trunk in Goodfellas and Ray Liotta’s childhood dream: ‘As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.’ It’s also a familiar joke, often quite harmless, or even pointless. But it can be a corrective reminder too. When was the last time you ran into a conspiracy in the midst of what you thought was random normality? It can’t be that long ago, and Michael Corleone’s theory becomes quite different if we talk about chances rather than guarantees.