This week on It’s All Right There In The Title Theater is Bullet Train Explosion (now on Netflix), which seems poised to get a lot of international eyeballs on a rechewed premise. It’s a Japanese remake of the well-regarded 1975 Japanese thriller Bullet Train, about a loco locomotive that’s rigged to explode if it dips below 80 km/hour. That should sound familiar to anyone hip to the ’90s cinema zeitgeist, as the film inspired American smash hit Speed, what with its bus that can’t dip below 50 mph without going kablooey. So logic leads us to wonder if the ingenious concept really needs to be exploited a third time, or if director Shinji Higuchi (Shin Godzilla) can innovate enough to justify its existence.
The Gist: It’s worth noting that Japanese train service Hayabusa allows its name and trains to be used for this film, giving it some real-life agency, but also arousing the sneaking suspicion that the company and its employees will inevitably be depicted as noble and forthright. Also, the trains’ teal-and-white-with-a-pink-stripe exteriors manifest as a symbol of nobility, and are photographed all shiny and gleaming, a lot like how Marvel movies engage in car-company product placement by shooting the freshly waxed vehicles at sexy low angles with the logo center-frame. Read: If you’re trying to sniff out the mad-bomber villain, rule out anyone wearing a Hayabusa badge.
Especially rule out stalwart train conductor Mr. Takaichi (Tsuyoshi Kusanagi), who we meet giving a flock of high-schoolers a guided tour before ushering them on board and commandeering this one-way 300-plus km/hr high-speed zoomer to Tokyo. You can track the where/when/how-far/how-fast particulars of the commute via dozens of subtitles the flash on and off the screen at a hyperactive pace, if you can read that fast. Not that such details really matter, because this situation quickly becomes baseline survivalist drama when 300-plus passengers and rail employees are subject to the scheme of a maniac who activated a bomb on the train that ensures detonation if it drops below 100 km/hr, and now demands 100 billion yen (that’s nearly 700 million American dollars) as ransom – and it has to be crowdfunded from the Japanese citizenry. Diabolical!
Of course – of course! – the train population includes a colorful conglomeration of personalities: A politician (Machiko Ono) skirting an adultery scandal who sees an opportunity to score PR points, an influencer (Jun Kaname) who wrote a bestseller, a variety of wide-eyed schoolgirls, a couple of sk8r bois, an old-timer whose electrician expertise comes in handy, a mysteriously calm gent who, we soon find out, wears a medical mask because he’s public enemy no. 1 because his helicopter crashed into an elementary school (!), etc. Meanwhile, in the Habayusa command center, rail honchos, dispatchers and engineers powwow with haggard cops and greezy government reps to problem-solve as the train blows through stops and perilously switches tracks at 120 km/hr, and figure out how to work around the government’s unyielding policy that they don’t negotiate with terrorists, in order to save all those lives.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Note: Not to be confused with 2022’s Brad Pitt snarkfest Bullet Train. Otherwise, looking past its Predecessors Of The Exact Same Concept, you’ve got your Runaway Trains and Snowpiercers – and we haven’t stared so intently at a speedometer since Back to the Future.
Performance Worth Watching: It’s easy to admire Kusanagi as the glue holding the movie’s variety of physical, moral and psychological conundrums together. He’s charismatic, but begging for a more fully fleshed-out character – and a stronger screenplay.
Memorable Dialogue: It seems inevitable that a couple of the almost-forgivable butthead characters would see a dire situation as a chance to boost their profiles: “Let’s raise our synergy!” the influencer guy says as he tries to collaborate with the scandalized politician lady.
Sex and Skin: Is there a bullet-train version of the mile-high club? Like the 300 km/hr club? I ask because there’s no sex in this movie.
Our Take: The problem with Bullet Train Explosion is as simple as the plot is convoluted: It’s too long. Bizarre for a highwire action saga, the movie never maintains a protracted sense of urgency. Individual moments reach sweaty-palmed peaks, and are keenly executed by Higuchi, who knows his way around an action sequence. But in between, it sags like the belly of an overburdened donkey. Its too many characters dilute the story’s emotional potency, and their interactions all blur together into a repetitive moosh of unconvincing, almost-cartoonish portrayals of approximate human drama, e.g., multiple eruptions into fistfights between various parties in disagreement. We get it. Tension runs high, tempers get hot. One, maybe two redfaced push-’n’-shoves would make the point, but a half-dozen? Overkill.
Most egregious is the reveal of the villain, which is a true eyeroller, and an excuse to indulge their convoluted backstory, which messily references the 1975 Bullet Train, so I guess Explosion is technically a sequel? It turns up some less-than-half-assed subtext about abusive relationships to go with an indictment of bureaucracy that finds the people in charge of the country making stubborn, logic-defying decisions (also taking Shin Godzilla into account, the Japanese government doesn’t get much love from Higuchi). Nearly everything is broadly rendered, especially the portrayal of Hayabusa employees – the driver, the snack-cart lady and the conductor’s greenhorn assistant show a selfless dedication to public service, teamwork and wholesome goodness, as inspired by the noble conductor himself. The humble types persevere under pressure while the arrogant, entitled types reveal themselves as turds (or are just lame comic relief), which, hooray for that, but next time, let’s tell this familiar story with a little more succinctness.
Our Call: Or maybe come up with a fresh premise? Just a thought. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.