Bullet Train

Brad Pitt stars as Ladybug, a luckless assassin who just wants a quiet life. His handler Maria convinces him to take one last job: grab a briefcase from a bullet train heading from Tokyo to Kyoto and get off at the next stop. Simple, right? Not when the train is packed with some of the deadliest killers in the world, all with overlapping agendas.

Director David Leitch, who cut his teeth on John Wick and Atomic Blonde, turns a single train into a pressure cooker of colorful characters. There are the bickering British twins Tangerine and Lemon, a venomous assassin called the Hornet, a vengeful father, and a schoolgirl who's far more dangerous than she looks. The film adapts Kotaro Isaka's novel Maria Beetle, the second in a trilogy of interconnected assassin stories.

Shot on a full-scale replica train built on a gimbal at Sony Pictures Studios, the movie leans hard into its own cartoonish energy. The action is tight and creative, the humor lands more often than it misses, and the whole thing moves at a breakneck pace. It's not trying to be deep, but it knows exactly what it is.[edit]

Ladybug boards the Shinkansen with a simple plan: grab a silver briefcase and hop off at the next station. But the briefcase is in the possession of Tangerine and Lemon, two British assassins escorting the kidnapped son of a powerful crime lord. Their mission is to deliver both the boy and the case to their boss in Kyoto.

Meanwhile, a former assassin named Kimura boards the train to find the person who pushed his young son off a rooftop. That person is Prince, a teenage girl who uses her innocent appearance to manipulate everyone around her. She's already planted a bomb on the train and is playing a long game that involves the briefcase and the crime lord known as the White Death.

The Hornet, a deadly poison specialist, is also on board with her own target. And Wolf, a man whose wedding was massacred, is hunting for the killer he believes is on the train. When Ladybug accidentally steals the briefcase from under the twins' noses, all these threads start tangling. The train becomes a maze of cramped cars where every door could lead to a fight and every passenger might be a killer.

Lemon, who sees the world through the lens of Thomas the Tank Engine, proves to be surprisingly perceptive. Tangerine is all bluster and violence. Prince plays everyone against each other. Ladybug, desperate to avoid killing, finds himself using a snake, a water bottle, and a lot of improvisation to survive. As the train speeds toward Kyoto, the body count rises and the briefcase changes hands multiple times, all while the White Death's shadow looms larger.[edit]