| Columbia Pictures | Release Date: August 5, 2022 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
20
Mixed:
32
Negative:
9
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Critic Reviews
Aug 3, 2022
Bullet Train feels like someone crossbred Kill Bill with a Final Destination movie. And at times, David Leitch’s film is almost as glorious as that description makes it sound — elaborate and ridiculous but dedicated to making the elaborate and the ridiculous feel … well, not plausible, exactly, but certainly compelling and fun.
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CNETAug 3, 2022
It's a gleefully exaggerated high-speed journey into action and comedy driven by swaggering star turns and first class boxcar brawls, and I'd work on that railroad all the live-long day -- no, I don't think I can keep this up. Bullet Train is just a hell of a fun time at the movies, OK?
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Aug 8, 2022
There’s a time and a place for mayhem, and that’s essentially what Bullet Train is: two hours of fights, carnage, and witty repartee. Oh, it’s too long, to be sure – probably at least by 20 minutes. And its puzzle-like structure is too complicated for its own good. But, taken on its own terms, it’s fun and energetic as only this sort of film can be.
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Aug 2, 2022
I had a good time with Bullet Train. I didn’t hate Bullet Train. I just think that I’ll begin to forget Bullet Train, and in remembering that I’ve forgotten it, I will resent it because I’m an easy mark for crime films and an easy mark for action movies—including but not limited to cheeky R-rated action-comedies
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Aug 3, 2022
It takes a special kind of smart to be really, really dumb. And make no mistake, Bullet Train is a really, really dumb movie. Like, every gunshot echoes around its gloriously vacant skull. Because there's also a particular kind of smart-dumb film that is endlessly, idiotically fun, and that's what Bullet Train is.
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RogerEbert.comAug 5, 2022
Bullet Train is at its best when it's a comedy about self-styled badasses who think they're free agents but are really all just passengers on a train rocketing from one station to another, oblivious to the desires of any individual riding on it. The abstractness and "it's all a lark" humor ultimately undo any aspect that might otherwise sink its roots into the viewer's mind.
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Aug 2, 2022
It’s no train wreck. Leitch’s film is colorful, cartoonish and well-choreographed. But the more-is-more manic energy of “Bullet Train” eventually peters out, since that’s all the movie was ever running on. Well, that and Pitt. His charm alone does wonders for the movie, raising it at least to the level of watchable.
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Aug 2, 2022
Given its premise and title, you’d expect a zippy movie with some momentum, yet too many flashbacks and a surprising amount of chattiness in the overlong film slows everything down – at least until a crazy albeit satisfying finale where Leitch pretty much cuts the brakes and lets chaos take the wheel.
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Aug 23, 2022
Aug 3, 2022
When Bullet Train sings it’s often a blackly hilarious and knowingly absurd slice of demented action goodness. When it doesn’t work, self-indulgence begins to creep in, almost as if the creative team deliberately set out to make something that would be fondly remembered as a cult favorite in the years to come, but that’s a sentiment that can only be earned, not cultivated.
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NMEAug 3, 2022
The film runs out of rail a long time before it stops moving. On the other hand, it’s almost impossible not to enjoy every moment that Pitt is on screen. Stealing the film with whatever he’s given (a water bottle, a bucket hat, an automatic toilet…), he’s clearly having a great time. It’s lucky for us that at least some of it rubs off.
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Aug 2, 2022
Ending up in a CG mess that tries to say something about karma, Bullet Train isn’t the Pulp Fiction on rails it thinks it is. What it is, though, is a whole dollop of fun. Buoyed by Leitch’s expert eye for action as well as one of the most hilariously disposable A-list casts around, the film has Friday night written all over it.
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SlashfilmAug 2, 2022
Considering the majority of modern mainstream fare, we can look at "Bullet Train" as a mild win, a presumably high-budgeted action film that boasts no superheroes, no extended universes, nothing like that. But though this film clears that low bar, Bullet Train is only ever mildly fun, while reminding you of movies that are often a whole lot better.
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Aug 5, 2022
Leitch’s emphasis on excessive and nearly nonstop stunt-filled action is hardly surprising. His lack of directorial discipline, however, is. The guy apparently couldn’t help himself, piling on the action beats until they become numbing. By the end, you’re more than ready to get off this Bullet Train, feeling drained and disheartened.
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Aug 4, 2022
It’s a mess of a plot and a literal trainwreck of a denouement. No faulting the destruction scenes, since they’re in Leitch’s wheelhouse, and as they say, every dollar is on the screen in that regard. But to paraphrase a quote from the late character actor Edmund Gwenn, killing is easy, comedy is hard.
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Aug 2, 2022
Bullet Train certainly moves at an appropriately brisk pace, with Brad Pitt heading a sprawling cast. But the breakneck action is offset by a smart-alecky tone that proves both uneven and occasionally too cute for its own good, along with a mashup of styles – from the music to the visuals – that comes across like a Quentin Tarantino wannabe, with a dash of “Deadpool” for good measure.
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Aug 2, 2022
Bullet Train has no shortage of giddy, madcap gusto, hoping to satiate hardcore genre fans with its bloody, over-the-top violence and rising body count. But this lumbering locomotive proves to be neither hilariously amoral nor liberatingly violent — it makes quite a commotion, but mostly just spins its wheels.
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Sep 3, 2022
Sure, the characters fight a lot (it is an action movie directed by a stunt guy, after all), and the fight work is consistently above average and sporadically funny, but they spend so much time talking about why they’re fighting, and whether they should fight that Bullet Train often times feels more like a yak-fest than an action movie
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Aug 2, 2022
There’s a universe where Bullet Train works — lean harder into the gaudy, neon-pop anime aesthetic, ditch the too-clever character work, and add some honest-to-God jokes into the mix. Unfortunately, as it stands, Bullet Train feels like a lost spec script from the mid-2000s, given a fresh new coat of paint and a few script reworks by some Reddit teens.
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The Observer (UK)Aug 7, 2022
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. It’s so imbecilic, you wouldn’t trust it to cross the road unsupervised, let alone negotiate Japan’s Shinkansen high-speed rail network.
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Aug 3, 2022
What’s missing is a bit of heart to make you care, or at least, a sense of knowing how to wrap it up quickly enough, and smartly enough, for it not to matter if you don’t. An amped-up Friday night audience might have fun with Bullet Train once, but it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to ride it again.
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The IndependentAug 3, 2022
Pitt’s funny here – there’s a precise comic timing to the way he shoves a venomous snake down a toilet bowl – but 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.
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Aug 3, 2022
Things really have to be precisely calibrated for comedy to work amidst all of this vicious violence—blood pours from eye sockets, gushes from neck arteries, and spouts from nearly decapitated heads—but no such luck. Instead, a talented ensemble of actors must stumble their way through chaotic tone shifts and declarations of irony that feel both uninspired and cruel.
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Aug 5, 2022
Every actor, bless them, works hard to sell the movie’s overweening moxie, leaning into the mannered quirk with admirable, if ultimately doomed, commitment. Pitt and Taylor-Johnson are perhaps best suited to the movie’s patter; they manage to give some actual fizz to leaden material. But those moments are short lived, and then it’s back to the awkward squirm of watching talented actors debase themselves for laughs that never come.
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Aug 2, 2022
For a movie with so much volatile physicality and bruising punishment, there’s an inertia about the whole thing, a soullessness that makes every contrived smirk grate. We don’t care about who gets pounded to a pulp or shot to pieces because there are no characters to root for — good guys or bad.
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Aug 2, 2022
Leitch’s talky, violent hit man movie, with Brad Pitt at the center of an over-cranked ensemble cast, reminds us why Hollywood has all but abandoned attempts to copy the successes of Tarantino and Ritchie. This film is not just bloated, tedious, dim-witted, and glib, it’s also redundant.
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The TelegraphAug 3, 2022
As a motor-mouthing smart-ass, the 58-year-old Pitt is badly miscast – every detail here seems tailored to Ryan Reynolds, director David Leitch’s Deadpool collaborator – while the film's bulging cast and bloated running time recalls those all-star capers of the 1960s: imagine It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World crossed with a migraine. For the sake of all that’s holy, take the bus.
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