I joined my university’s film club recently, and at my first meeting the members screened Bullet Train, which had only just been released. I originally planned to stay for half an hour before heading back to the dorm, but the film kept me in my seat until the end.
Directed by David Leitch, who previously made John Wick, the film has the same energetic, hard-hitting approach to action. Yet Bullet Train is not simply another exercise in stylish violence. It is more theatrical, more deliberately playful, and in places more artful. The film feels like a chaotic mixture of hot-blooded Japanese animation, Hollywood popcorn entertainment, and a touch of Eastern Zen. The combination should be excessive, but it produces something surprisingly fresh.
That freshness was particularly welcome. After a period in which my response to films had begun to feel somewhat dulled, it was refreshing to encounter a movie capable of catching me off guard again.
A chain of coincidences on a moving train
The entire story unfolds aboard a high-speed train. Several assassins, each carrying a different assignment and personal objective, gradually find themselves pursuing the same target. Their plans repeatedly collide, and one seemingly accidental encounter leads to another.
The film controls its rhythm well across its roughly two-hour running time. It knows when to accelerate, when to pause, and how to keep the audience’s attention shifting between anticipation and surprise. Coincidences and misunderstandings pile up until they produce outcomes that are both unexpected and, in retrospect, perfectly consistent with what came before.
The film’s emphasis on fate is important here. Its heightened coincidences and almost absurd chain of cause and effect pull the violence away from ordinary reality. That distance makes it easier to enjoy the action without becoming weighed down by the moral ugliness of all the killing. The plot is inventive enough, and its momentum is smooth enough, that the movie remains an entertaining watch even when its structure becomes increasingly elaborate.
For me, the strongest part of the screenplay is the care given to foreshadowing and dialogue. Almost every shot and exchange feels brisk and purposeful. Even the apparently throwaway jokes seem to be planting something for later. By the final act, many of these small details return and find their place, creating a satisfying sense of closure.
That kind of payoff recalls films built around carefully gathered clues, such as Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, the Spanish thriller The Invisible Guest, Duncan Jones’s Source Code, and the classic Shutter Island. Bullet Train is lighter and more flamboyant than those films, but it shares their pleasure in making earlier details matter after the fact.
Action with a deliberately exaggerated style
As an action film, Bullet Train stands noticeably above the average in its camera movement and shot composition. The editing is confident, and the use of montage is sometimes so conspicuous that it borders on overstatement. That may well be intentional: the film often seems to be embracing the exaggerated visual language of Japanese animation rather than merely borrowing its surface style.
The color palette and production design also receive considerable attention. The train’s compartments and other locations are arranged with a strong sense of visual character, while the costumes help identify the personalities and roles of the various assassins at a glance. Much of the styling is familiar and occasionally predictable, but it works within the conventions of a large-scale commercial film. The details show that the filmmakers were not treating the action as an excuse to neglect the world around it.
The main weakness, in my view, is the way the film incorporates East Asian influences. Some of those elements feel attached from the outside rather than naturally integrated into the story and setting. The blend can therefore seem a little forced. Still, this is not a fatal problem, especially because the film’s heightened tone makes a certain amount of artificiality part of its design.
Overall, Bullet Train is one of the more distinctive and successful popcorn movies of recent years. It may not be profound, and its cultural mixture is not always seamless, but it is stylish, fast-moving, packed with setups, and genuinely fun to watch. Spending two hours on it is an easy recommendation if what you want is an energetic, carefully assembled thrill ride.
My rating would be around three stars, perhaps a little above that. As for the title of this review, it eventually became clear that it had almost nothing to do with the actual discussion. Fate, apparently, does not always need a ladybug to make a mess of everyone’s plans.