While the title gives the impression that this is an Asylum-style mockbuster ripping off the little-loved Brad Pitt-starring Bullet Train, the new Bullet Train Explosion is in fact a sort of legacy sequel to the 1975 film Bullet Train, directed by Junya Sato. Further complicating matters are the similarities between Bullet Train Explosion and the beloved ‘90s action classic Speed, which itself was an unofficial (rip-off) version of that same ‘70s Bullet Train. This updated version is helmed by Shinji Higuchi, best known for the live action version of Attack on Titan and for collaborating with Hideaki Anno on Shin Godzilla, amongst other genre projects. But whether viewers are familiar with any of these particular antecedents is likely besides the point; Bullet Train Explosion is a tedious slog regardless of your familiarity with Speed. The film is a paean to sturdy, reliable professionalism in the face of unbearable stress, but it never manages to build up a real head of steam.
The day begins inauspiciously enough; conductor Kazuya Takachi (Tsuyoshi Kusanagi) is showing a group of teenage school girls around the station before boarding the Hayabusa 60, the sleek, high-tech train of the title. Keiji Fujii (Kanata Hosoda), meanwhile, is the eager rookie who follows Takachi around to learn the ropes. They stop in to check on the train driver, Chika (Non), and they all prepare for departure as soon as the various passengers board. But no sooner has the train taken off than the central Command station receives a phone call — there’s a bomb on the train, and if it goes below 120 mph, it will explode. To prove it’s not a hoax, the bomber has also placed an explosive device on a freight train some miles away; as soon as it idles under 5 miles per hour, it explodes, leading to instant panic amongst the train company executives and various politicians. These early scenes alternate between observing the frantic deliberations amongst the control room workers and introducing a handful of the passengers: there’s disgraced politician Yuko Kagami (Machiko Ono), who’s constantly being heckled by other passengers; a millionaire social media influencer named Todoroki (Jun Kaname); and Yuzuki (Hana Toyoshima), one of the high school students who may or may not know what’s going on. In either case, once the train starts blowing through its scheduled stops, it’s not long before everyone knows what’s going on, and Kazuya suddenly has his hands full with keeping everyone calm and diffusing various conflicts as temperatures flare.
Higuchi orchestrates these various threads with a minimum of flair, constantly cutting between the action on the train, the various functionaries on the outside attempting to manage the situation, and a bevy of shots of the train zipping across various landscapes. Like the ‘70s disaster films this is mostly modeled after, the human drama is threadbare, an odd cross-section of personality types meant to generate drama, but which instead mostly irritate. Sequences in the control room feature lots of staring at screens and gnashing of teeth, but it’s all filmed so flatly that it becomes simply perfunctory. Even odder is that much of the narrative is functionally wrapped up at the one-hour mark, when a majority of the passengers are rescued from the moving train, leaving only a handful of people still on board and hurtling towards Tokyo. At this point, the film fully reveals the bomber and their motives, and the entire second half becomes a sort of melodrama about the value of individual human lives versus the greater good. It’s all very chintzy, with mediocre special effects that never manage to sell the speed of the train or the impact of explosions and frequent near-misses. Like conductor Takachi, Bullet Train Explosion is well-intentioned (in its genre aims) and stolid — and ultimately as bland as can be.
DIRECTOR: Shinji Higuchi; CAST: Tsuyoshi, Kanata Hosoda, Non, Jun Kaname, Machiko Ono; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; STREAMING: April 23; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 14 min.
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