from Sony Pictures
I sometimes review movies I’ve seen on Netflix in 288 characters on Twitter, and so it’s a different experience having Sony Pictures send me a complimentary DVD of their recent movie ‘Bullet Train’ in the mail for review.
As is common these days, the one DVD case included Blu-ray, standard, and digital versions of the movie. I couldn’t use our Blu-ray player, as my wife and her friends had taken over our movie room. Windows never supported Blu-ray (out of pique that Sony’s format won out over its own HD DVD format), and even dropped support for DVDs some years ago, but then I spied the download coupon.
I entered the 16-character alphanumeric code at Sony’s Web site. Sony noted its approval, shoved me unceremoniously over to Google’s Play site (for the actual download, I suppose), which then got pouty, said something was wrong, and asked me to wait. So, I popped in the standard DVD into an external DVD drive, and watched it with VLC on my laptop. Old technology is reliable technology.
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Ya, so, the story line. Brad Pitt is a hitman hired to retrieve an attaché case from the bullet train that runs between Tokyo and Kyoto. The actual train ride takes 2 hours 15 minutes, but in the fantasyland of this movie, the action begins in evening, continues all night long, and ends mid-day the next day -- all while the train swooshes through computer-generated cityscapes.
Pitt easily finds the attaché case, and then the storyline explodes. He is not the only hitman; by the end of the story, I counted ten, although I may have miscounted, who work together, against each other, and form alliances of convenience -- firstly to nab the case (containing millions in US$ and gold), and secondly to keep from being killed by other hitmen -- and two hitwomen. Sometimes we get their background story, sometimes we don’t. Cliches abound.
The dialog is sardonic, the style I love, with every line being like a straight-line setup for a joke that never comes. The two British hitmen, who are twins (one white, one black) have the best deliveries, reminiscent of Ocean’s 11; Pitt is passable, lacking the edge I’d come to expect, but ups his game when remembering his therapist’s advice for remaining calm and spreading peacefulness. The poorest delivery is by the Russian mob boss’s daughter (oops, gave away something there) who tries to be a cool cat but should have maintained the role of a walk-on passenger.
At two hours, the movie could’ve lagged from its mainly single location (inside long narrow hyperclean train cars) and single plot line (get the attaché case without then getting killed!) so adding more and more hitmen and women expands the storyline, keeping it moving along.
The screenwriters chose to add the gratuitous violence and excessive sweary language that I suppose appeals to some f***ing narrow demographic. For me, the spurting blood scenes were unnecessarily distracting, even eye-averting. Perhaps the idea was to re-imagine the FPS (first person shooter) game environment. Adding jocular music to scenes of horror might be the director’s method of normalizing the extreme. No woke ideology in this one!
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In the age of all-you-can-watch-for-$10/month Netflix and its erstwhile competitors, is there even a place for still making legacy-style movies, let alone trucking out to the local movieplex to pay too much to watch them? (I’ve never cared to sit in a movie theatre, what with sticky floors and all.) That Sony includes regular, Blu-ray, and digital versions in the $20 price tag tells you they're working at remaining relevant.
Given that the movie is based on Kotaro Isaka’s Bullet Train book (the title is a double entendre), it could have been far more Japanese and far less American; the Japanese-isms that occur are high stereotypes, and so having been in both Tokyo and Kyoto, I felt I was instead visiting a California Adventure version of Japan.
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