Bullet Train

 It's been a long time since I've seen a movie as desperate to be hip and funny as Bullet Train. It fails on both counts. But more disappointingly, it doesn't deliver a lot of great action, either.

 This is specially disappointing, as it's directed by David Leitch, who with co-director Chad Stahelski led the western action film renaissance with John Wick (Fury Road came a year later and stole their thunder(dome), but that's no slight on their impact).
 Leitch went on to do Atomic Blonde and Deadpool 2 -both excellent- but this is far closer to Hobbs and Shaw: unfunny, bloated, and so fucking full of itself.

 Brad Pitt plays an operative code-named Ladybug who is sent to board the titular bullet train in Tokyo to retrieve a McGuffin stored somewhere on board. Brad Pitt's schtick (and everyone has a schtick here, it's that sort of movie) is that he's a kind goofball motormouth with a metaphysical, chronical run of bad luck, and a hard-on for self-help.

 The briefcase, it turns out, contains a buttload of money in bills and bullion to pay for the ransom of your stereotypical badass yakuza overlord's son. As it turns out, there's a few assassins, mercenaries and assorted miscreants on board the train, and most of the movie's overlong second act consists of untangling all the parties' motivations as the fight and make alliances with each other.

 Once the plot is untangled, then the movie finally settles down a little bit. With clear(er) motivations and on-track to a final confrontation against the big bad, the movie gets a lot better and finally delivers on some cool action, but by that point it's too little, too late.

 Because to get there you need to get through a gauntlet of cutesy humor and running gags (that name is doubly deserved here- they are run into the fucking ground!) delivered with an obnoxious grin and wink by a script trying so hard to be cool and clever that you can taste the flopsweat.
 There are some good gags in the mix, and some others that I appreciate on paper, but the miss-to-hit ratio of the jokes is unacceptable. The tone of the movie is even worse - it feels like it's pointing out every little thing it does and singling it out for praise. The script itself is built around fate and luck, which is fine but means that the plot is built around little connections and coincidences that the movie will highlight and then get back to with quick flashbacks when it comes up again. Like an annoying, eager-to-please kid showing you his... fidget spinner collection or whatever kids are into these days. And of course, if you think about details beyond the ones that the plot specifically set up it all comes tumbling down, but hey.

 I personally didn't find the action very appealing; it's gruesome, fun and it's always clear what's happening to whom, but a lot of the connective tissue within the fights seems missing- mostly I assume to focus on funny (or "funny") beats and a quick rhythm. I appreciate they're trying something new a bit outside the 87North signature style, but until some bits close to the end I just didn't think it was memorable at all. 

 There's a lot to like in this movie, even while it's being kind of insufferable. Pitt and Bryan Tyree Henry (PaperBoiiii!) are excellent and often funny even when saddled some truly dire lines, which is a testament to their talent and charisma. Zazie Beetz barely registers. Poor Hiroyuki Sanada (TwilightSamuraiiii!) just gets to look cool with a cane/katana combo and provide exposition, but he hogs all the best action scenes.
 The rest of the cast don't fare so well - Aaron Taylor Johnson is kind of annoying in a kind of James MacAvoy type role, and I really disliked Joey King as a teen sociopath. Happy to chalk that down to the script rather than the actors, as even the conceit for King's character is pretty lame.
 Oh, and we also get surprise Michael Shannon! He proceeds to Shannon things up admirably, but he's been better deployed elsewhere. 

Surprise Michael Shannon! is the best surprise.

 It's a handsome-looking movie as well, overtly artificial looking at times but you can at least tell they were going for an aesthetic. As with Deadpool 2, I appreciate when expensive special effects scenes are used to sell goofy slapstick jokes like Pitt banging his head against random objects in an extended slow motion (and CGI-heavy) scene. 

There are also some genuine moments of cleverness buried in the script - even an extremely cutesy and tiresome schtick where Tyree Henry keeps classifying others as Thomas the Tank Engine characters makes for some surprisingly fun twists in the story, but only after it's been used as exasperatingly as possible. And as mentioned above I did like the final act. Movies that end well are easier to forgive, but all in all this was pretty damn disappointing.

The Princess

 I have a couple of friends who are, shall we say, not best pleased about more or less current pop culture developments (to varying degrees). You probably know the type: the ones that complain because all films these days are virtual feminist manifestos, trying to turn our children into transexuals, or part of whatever liberal agenda they want to rail against. People who use woke* as an insult.

 I'm not saying that they don't have any grounds to stand on, obviously. Things have undoubtedly changed; Stuff that just wasn't shown before is being shown now, and some long-running tendencies are being corrected, somewhat. Sometimes gracefully, sometimes not. And yes, some times it's being done for what seem like mercenary reasons. But that's just the way it goes. Are you really complaining about people bringing ideology into their art? The nerve! Art is obviously best when it doesn't try to say anything! Also, the irony of bringing ideology into their criticism will probably forever elude them.

 Anyhow here comes The Princess, strutting into the fight like a #girlboss, proudly and very bluntly wearing its progressive feminist creds on its sleeve. So what happens when it's a bit shite just because, well, it's a bit shite? For reasons that far outstrip its ideological takes? Oh man, it's a Widows/Black Panther situation all over agains, isn't it?

 I like the premise: Once Upon A Time, there was a The Princess (Joey King) who didn't want to marry a conceited, chauvinistic, evil prince from a neighboring realm (Dominic Cooper) in an arranged marriage. Arranged marriages, right? Scourge of our times, cause celebre among progressives. We're against it, you know.
 Anyhow. Because she spurned him, the prince invaded her castle and is holding her family hostage.

 Now, unbeknownst to her father (Ed Stoppard), who is a staunch traditionalist, The Princess is a badass fighter who's been training in martial arts since she was a wee The Princess.
 So The Princess needs to go out and fight a whole army in her own castle, The Raid Style, to set things right.

 And yes- from the beginning the whole feminist angle is a bit of a problem, because it's never subtle or in the background. All men underestimate women, They all leer and objectify them. They all suffer for it. It gets old pretty quick, and it caused several eye rolls not because I have a problem with the concept, but because it's so on-the-nose. But as usual this 'wokeness' - or rather, its cack-handed integration into the movie - is a minor issue at best. There are several, much more pressing problems...

 ...the main one being The Princess.

 She's just not either an engaging character or any sort of credible physical menace, and despite clearly having had loads of training and a lot of enthusiasm, I just didn't find her a convincing martial arts fighter. This is specially clear once she's paired with her mentor, played by the great Veronica Ngo, who effortlessly outclasses her in each and every one of the aforementioned categories but perversely remains little more than a sidekick.
 Dominic West is reliable as always, happy to chew on scenery as the asshole prince. Olga Kurylenko plays the main heavy and adds a lot to the movie- another actor who seems like she could have The Princess for breakfast.

  The script is another big problem. It's smugly self-congratulatory on how feminist it is whilst not saying anything interesting on the subject, sure. But it's also not afraid to engage in some fat-shaming humor, or code all the evil brutes working for the evil king as working-class people. It makes sure to show that the good, besieged king has a multi-cultural, inclusive kingdom (the evil prince specifically calls him out on it!). But... all the royals are white; the foreign people are advisers, servants, part of the entourage. Oh, and monarchy does work, it's just a few bad apples that give it a bad name. 
 Do  I actually care about any of these 'lapses' in the 'progressive agenda'? Nah, not really -they kind of go hand in hand with the faery tale setting, after all- but they do drive home just how half-baked this movie is.
 It's just a piss-poor script that doesn't otherwise distinguish itself at any point with any clever moments or interesting twists, and doesn't really have anything interesting to say about feminism or anything else; a b-movie action script with feminist-targeted marketing and no real ideas of its own.

 And the continuity is unconvincing, too. The size and level of threats accosting The Princess keep varying; wasn't there a dozen soldiers chasing her from the top of the tower? Where'd they all go? Oh, look, a single guy came down but now there's a lot of soldiers coming from downstairs. Very sloppy.

 The action should be what carries the film, but it's merely OK; pretty tame by eastern action movie standards, and many newer western ones. Some of the choreographies are elaborate, and a couple of fights are fun, but not having a good martial artist actor drags most of them down. There's a whole lot of posing, a whole lot of skipped frames to make things seem more brutal and exciting, and quite a few fairly boring, filler-like fight scenes.
 It's bloody, too, but with curiously little impact, and next to no gore. Very unremarkable in a post-Game of Thrones world. Weird that they'd make that stylistic choice but leave it so neutered.

 This is something that's completely forgivable in a B-movie, but the special effects do need a separate mention, because they are flat-out terrible. The distant landscapes composited onto the background look like they were rendered on last-gen consoles, and the less said about the couple of fire effects the better. But far better movies have stumbled with this sort of thing, I guess.

 So yeah. I didn't hate it, but it was pretty much a waste of time - a mediocre B-movie without weirdness or laughs; At least it moves quickly and despite some bloat, it's gone without causing much offense. Unless you're offended by all the (pretty superficial) feminism, of course.
 
 Director Le-Van Kiet and deuteragonist Veronica Ngo had previously teamed up for slow-burn martial arts movie Furie, which is available on Netflix here in the UK and really fucking good; given the choice, just go watch that instead. There's nothing to see here.

*To be fair, I do think woke is a fugly neologism.