David Leitch offers up an action-comedy that has glimmers of amusement but is too smarmy and convoluted to succeed.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 18, 2024

It’s not fatal that Leitch and company have no evident goal other than to amuse audiences with two hours of spiffy nonsense, but there’s a whiff of try-hard desperation behind the film’s bravado.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Oct 3, 2022

It’s a shame that the filmmakers didn’t trust the spatial and dramatic tensions provided by the train journey, and opted instead for seen-it-all-before spectacle.

| Sep 9, 2022

The largely entertaining action flick Bullet Train rolls along on the power of Brad Pitt’s megawatt charisma – and sometimes on that alone.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 12, 2022

Bullet Train certainly serves the Brad Pitt brand, but it’s too weak to deliver him to a new destination.

| Aug 11, 2022

This film adaptation, by screenwriter Zak Olkewicz, is a blessing and a curse. It creates, builds and lights the fuse on this Molotov cocktail. But the script’s overabundance of characters, dips in momentum and protracted ending don’t help.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 10, 2022

Bullet Train is infuriatingly pleased with itself. And ground zero for this implosion of self-satisfaction is Pitt.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 7, 2022

The plot is a tagliatelle of insubstantiality. Just assume that everyone is set to double-cross everyone else. The dialogue, alas, dwells far too much in the pop-culture miasma that may be Quentin Tarantino’s most regrettable gift to the culture.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 7, 2022

For all the screwball comedy, droll retorts, and kinetic action, "Bullet Train" entertains, until it goes over-the-top, which is not long before the train literally goes off the rails.

| Aug 6, 2022

Bullet Train is shooting nothing but blanks.

| Aug 5, 2022

I think the maximalist part is a little too maximal. There's just too much going on in this movie.

| Aug 5, 2022

Brad Pitt keeps it going and buoyant... I love the how he toys with his own persona.

| Aug 5, 2022

In aiming to create a sense of non-stop comedic chaos, "Bullet Train" winds up feeling a little too calculated for its own good. It makes it to the station, but the ride is a bumpy one.

| Original Score: B- | Aug 5, 2022

The well-written movie hurtles along, bouncing between zingers and stingers, a runaway train of entertainment.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 5, 2022

Mr. Leitch’s frantic distractions aren’t those of a magician building toward a grand moment of prestige. He’s simply a juggler trying to throw as many balls as possible in the air; his act is all momentum.

| Original Score: C+ | Aug 5, 2022

The movie deserves extra props for making Aaron Taylor-Johnson – who has always felt like dead weight in movies like Kick-Ass and Godzilla – an appealing on-screen presence who actually holds our interest up until the Bullet Train goes off the CGI rails.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 5, 2022

It’s pure escapism at its finest, with no message or lesson at its core.

| Aug 5, 2022

Quentin Tarantino crossed with a Road Runner cartoon, and, as such, relentlessly entertaining and more than a little full of itself.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 5, 2022

Bullet Train is never boring, and it certainly moves, but it’s like an overdose of action moviemaking: much sound and fury, signifying nothing. This should’ve been more fun.

| Aug 5, 2022

A technically and logistically ambitious movie that doesn't leave much of an emotional or intellectual footprint.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 5, 2022