Once upon a time, the beautiful man who dumped everyone back then finally became both virtuous and artistic, especially after winning the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in 2020, it seems that it is difficult to have a movie that can arouse Brad Pitt's interest, until this "Bullet Train" in 2022.
It seems that every top Hollywood actor has an ulterior R-rated film dream hidden in his heart, and what helped Brad Pitt become famous was an R-rated film "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood", and the director was Quentin Tarantino, known as the "King of R-rated Films" in Hollywood.
"Bullet Train" is hard not to be reminiscent of one of Quentin's famous works "Kill Bill", where a group of people who want to kill each other suddenly appear on a train from Tokyo to Kyoto, and many viewers can't figure out why this group of people killed their heads when they see the ending. Brad Pitt plays a second-hand professional killer who struggles to find a suitcase throughout the film, and after a chaotic plot of gains and losses, the train arrives at the terminal.
There is an important difference between watching Quentin Tarantino movies and watching imitation Quentin Tarantino movies, viewers do not waste time on the storyline of Quentin movies, but tend to indulge in the strong personal style of Quentin movies. Watching a Quentin Tarantino style movie like "Bullet Train" is often entangled in a variety of unreasonable movie plots.
Why do two professional killers put suitcases full of banknotes in the luggage compartment of a train? Why did the daughter of the gangster boss kill her father? And what does the Mexican killer who fought so the train have to do with this story? A simple and crude R-rated film makes people's brains hurt, which means that something must be wrong.
The movie "Bullet Train" is based on a Japanese mystery novel "Ladybug", but in order to include Hollywood A-list stars like Brad Pitt in the movie, the main actors of the entire film have been replaced by Westerners. What's even more twisting is that the final boss in the movie has also become the Japanese underworld boss played by American actor Michael Shannon, which makes people watch the play in minutes.
Compared with "Bullet Train" and "Kill Bill", two Japanese-themed films made by Westerners, although Quentin's "Kill Bill" is also full of common sense problems in the eyes of Orientals, Quentin firmly grasps the symbol of Japanese culture, the katana. Twenty years later, the storyline of "Kill Bill" may not be remembered by many people, but the classic look of Uma Thurman wearing a tracksuit and holding a katana is unforgettable, and this picture full of Chinese and Western cultural clashes is a true portrayal of Eastern culture in the hearts of Westerners like Quentin. In contrast, the movie scenes of "Bullet Train" will not make people feel contradictory in any country, and no one can tell that this is a movie adapted from a Japanese novel.
As we all know, the young Quentin was obsessed with Hong Kong action films and Japanese sword and halberd films, which had an important influence on the "aesthetics of violence" he later created, especially the "Kill Bill". And "Bullet Train" director David Leitch was born in Wuxing and served as a stuntman for Brad Pitt for many years, which also makes "Bullet Train" destined to be only a wonderful action movie, this "Kill Pete" and the "Kill Bill" of the year are fundamentally different things.
Time has passed, Quentin, who came from a "ticket friend", did not become a master director after all, and his film style is also changing with the times, even Quentin himself cannot imitate himself, not to mention those latecomers who draw tigers according to cats.