Kritiken

[Bullet Train] is clearly designed to be pure, visceral entertainment, screaming fun! at every turn. But it’s a shrill, razor-shredded mess, a fringy assemblage of action, cartoony violence, and allegedly snappy dialogue that has the soporific effect of white noise. This is proof that too much lousy action is worse than no action at all.

“Bullet Train" [is] a glib, slick and shallow slice of Japanophile action entertainment that offers a very bright, shiny surface but has absolutely no interest in revealing anything beyond that.

There are plenty of big, dumb action movies that can deliver thrills without exactly taxing the brain. And then there are films that are so thunderously stupid they bypass guilty-pleasure status and end up as a danger to themselves and all around them. Bullet Train falls into the latter camp.

[Bullet Train] is so chaotically exhausting it proves beyond the talented actors’ saving. It plays like the last 20 minutes of a much-better action film stretched out to the length of a biblical epic.

"Bullet Train" is at its best when it's a comedy about self-styled badasses who think they're free agents but are all just passengers on a train rocketing from one station to another... But the abstractness and "it's all a lark" humor neuter aspects that might sink roots into the viewer's mind.

[Bullet Train] is watchable — it stars Brad Pitt — jokey, sometimes funny and predictably stupid... [The film] doesn’t have any ideas, beyond the geometric problems presented by all its bodies jostling within small spaces, which means that there’s not much to think about other than how good Pitt looks and how the violence lands.

Bullet Train feels so try-hard in its quirky theatrics that it’s a little like watching a kid repeatedly calling for their mother’s attention before they cartwheel into a brick wall. It’s Tarantino-esque at a time when that descriptor is so overused it can only be derogatory.

[Bullet Train] is the cinematic equivalent of the delayed 17.20 to Didcot Parkway, sitting in a siding somewhere outside Reading with broken air conditioning, a closed buffet car, cancelled seat reservations, the “See it, say it, sorted” announcement on repeat, and no trolley service due to a shortage of crew.

Nearly every single gag in this belabored action film is a wheezy relic from a post-Tarantino time when canned meta-commentary reigned supreme... [Bullet Train] is an unrelenting hash of tics and asides and rejoinders that pile up next to the bodies, far more off-putting than any of the film’s lugubrious gore.

To choreograph all this, both on a story level and an action-design level, and to make it make any kind of sense is a fairly impressive feat. [Leitch] ... understands how to stage creative action scenes... [Their] brazen intricacy is the point, taking precedence over realism or narrative purpose. Bullet Train carries you along through sheer verve and audacity.

[Bullet Train] is a movie that is almost constantly two things at once: breezily lighthearted and overwrought; hyper-energetic and lazy; bracingly fresh and drearily derivative... If you’re craving one more variation on the well-worn theme of promiscuous bloodlettings accompanied by glib verbal filler, Leitch has served up a presentable slab of grist for an increasingly creaky mill.

[Bullet Train] rattles strenuously on and on and on with unexciting and uninterestingly choreographed fights, cameos which briefly pep up the interest and placeholder non-lines where the funny material should have gone.