Filmmakers have been ripping off Quentin Tarantino’s motor-driven, jukebox-boogie style for so long that scams have spawned their own scams, which in turn have spawned theirs own ripoff, and so into oblivion. The latest branch of this incestuous family tree of extremely violent comedies is the killer Express train, a hyperactive, massive barrage of kill-or-be-killed jokey mayhem. As directed by David Leitch, folding a bunch of Tarantino’s sixth-hand shenanigans into his signature John Wick twist, the film plays like a great-great-grandson Pulp Fiction. This means that it is also related to multiple generations of bastard offspring, straight from Free Fire to Seven psychopaths to Smoking aces to some of the earliest and most memorable contenders, Guy Ritchie’s underworld picaresques with lads and lads.
Express train takes all the stereotypical hallmarks of the QT school of crime jokes—ironic needle-dropping pop, digressive pop-culture blather, the ultra-violent “And I shot Marvin in the face” punchline—and blows them up into a neon, candy-coated cartoon of frivolous Saturday morning carnage. True to its title, the film takes place almost entirely in a single locomotive hurtling from Tokyo to Kyoto on the Shinkansen. That moving background is reflected in the supersonic speed of the banter and gunfire, but not in the non-linear trajectory of the narrative, which constantly breaks into reflows of relevant splashes of backstory, including a literal fourth-wall body count—a groundbreaking montage and a belated payoff of backstory that creates an unconventional deposit to Chekhov’s armory.
Zen cool is one of the most reliable weapons in Pitt’s arsenal
Holding the film together, like crazy superstar glue, is the breezy nonchalance of the lead actor, Brad Pitt. He was cast as a newly enlightened hired gunman after a long hiatus from the killing business. Zen cool is one of the most reliable weapons in Pitt’s arsenal—he recently won an Oscar trying out a relaxed, vaguely menacing variation of it—and here the actor twists that quality into a can’t-we-all-get-together kind of thing that’s meant to clash comically with his line of work. He is the closest thing to a wrong man in a cast of characters almost exclusively made up of gangsters and murderers. In practice, that means lots of scenes of Pitt spouting therapy jargon and yelling things like “Aw, come on, man!” while avoiding death – a taste of the flamboyant sitcom matrix of R-rated dialogue, which pretty much constantly vacillates between funny and just plain obnoxious.
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Ladybug, as Pitt’s character is codenamed, has a seemingly simple task: grab a briefcase of ransom money from the train in question. The problem is that it’s conveyed by the film’s answer to Jules and Vincent — a pair of chatty, murderous brothers from another mother named Tangerine (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Lemon (Brian Tyree Henry). The two follow the money, along with the kidnapped offspring of a crime boss (Logan Lerman) they rescue, to the child’s notoriously brutal Yakuza-turned-Russian kingpin father, the White Death. To make things even more, exponentially more complicated, the traveler’s manifesto also includes a bunch of other killers with intertwined schemes and motives, played by Joey King, Andrew Koji, rapper Bad Bunny and more. (There’s hardly a role in this film where someone isn’t recognizable; even the small parts make the big-name cameos easier.)
Express train it’s a bit like a version Murder on the Orient Express where everyone is trying to kill everyone, and no one is trying to solve anything.
Surprisingly, this relentless juke fest cocaine binge has literary roots. It is based on the acclaimed bestseller by Japanese writer Kōtarō Isaka MarijaBuba. Isaka generally specializes in mysteries, which explains the locked room plot and A clue-plate eccentricity characterization. Express train it’s a bit like a version Murder on the Orient Express where everyone is trying to kill everyone, and no one is trying to solve anything. Script, by Street of fear adapter Zak Olkewicz, takes some of the fun out of the plot, keeping us guessing as to how these various revenges and subplots will intersect. It also makes good use of some of the setting’s unique properties, including how the train only stops for one minute at each stop, adding the occasional ticking of the clock to the series of obstacles Ladybug and company face.
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Leitch, a former stuntman relevantly responsible for competitions of action excesses and ballet (Atomic blonde) and joke (Deadpool 2), seems similarly drawn to the logistical limitations of the Shinkansen. Narrow passages and cramped compartments naturally suit his taste for intense and mechanically precise close-up combat – the way he’ll make a miniature spectacle, for example, of wrestling to press a pin into a tank with a muscular forearm around him. your neck. Leitch’s hugely influential choreography (“Wickian” is among the more useful recent additions to the vernacular of adrenaline junkies) has always flirted with slapstick. Express train completes the pickup line, completely turning full-contact skirmishes and bloody killing blows into jokes. Here, a brawl in a silent car becomes farce at its broadest, two men interrupting their tooth-and-nail fight to the death to address an oblivious yuppie passenger who silences them.
Should we really care about a cold-blooded killer with a habit of comparing his marks and companions to characters from Thomas & friends?
Express train it’s most enjoyable in its earliest parts, when the plot is racing to catch up with itself, the complications seeming to pile up forever, and the cast list of vividly over-the-top comic book killers keeps growing. Only when all the pieces finally fall into place does the weakness of this bombastic Rube Goldberg IMAX epic come into focus. Behind all the nihilistic shenanigans is a meditation on soap opera fate that assumes a little too much investment in the fate of characters who are mostly defined by their unusual styles of dress, speech and preoccupation. Are we really meant to care about a cold-blooded killer with a habit of comparing his marks and comrades to characters from Thomas & friends? (It’s a gag that counts as the worst parody of Tarantino’s TV brain ever, or just the ultimate example of trend-killing.) The late entry of martial arts mundane Hiroyuki Sanada is an obvious Hail Mary for gravity, a late bid to give a generally nonsensical mass of bodies and archetypes a touch of philosophical weight.
BULLET TRAIN – Official Trailer 2 (HD)
Best to appreciate Express train for the novel measure his pastiche — the way Leitch has given Tarantino’s three-decade-and-counting homage to its biggest stage yet, via an overlong live-action anime with almost as many famous faces as the Oscars and an aesthetic that sometimes suggests a $90 million T-Mobile commercial dollars. Yet Leitch failed, as nearly every QT-man before him did, to capture the essential truth of the master’s work: even before he discarded the oft-imitated foundations of his early Miramax video-clerk discoveries, Tarantino was a subversive storyteller , as interested in confounding the expectations set by its jumbled plot elements as it was in wringing a fresh chill out of them. Express train he has the moves of Jack Rabbit Slim, but not the touch. It is Pulp distraction at best.
Express train opens in theaters everywhere on Friday, August 5. For more reviews and writing by AA Dowd, visit his Authory page.
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Categories: GAMING
Source: newstars.edu.vn