Brad Pitt plays an assassin called Ladybug who wants one quiet job. He gets a bullet train instead, and roughly a dozen other killers want the same briefcase he does. David Leitch directed Bullet Train, a 2022 action comedy written by Zak Olkewicz and based on Kōtarō Isaka’s 2010 novel. It runs 126 minutes and it never once sits still.
Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.
Ladybug and the Briefcase
The setup is a locked-room mystery spread across a moving train. Ladybug is a last-minute replacement for a colleague named Carver, guided remotely by his handler Maria, played by Sandra Bullock. His job is to grab a briefcase and get off. His bad luck, which tends to kill everyone near him while leaving him standing, has other plans.
That premise is the film’s best asset and its main problem. A train is a clean container for a farce. Leitch fills it with people who all have connected, conflicting reasons to be aboard, and the collisions are the point. But the movie keeps cutting away from the container to explain itself.
Lemon, Tangerine, and the Son
Two British assassins, brothers named Lemon and Tangerine, are escorting a young man called the Son to his father, a Russian-born yakuza boss known as the White Death. Brian Tyree Henry and Aaron Taylor-Johnson play the pair. They are also supposed to deliver the briefcase, which holds cash, to the White Death.
The Son turns up fatally poisoned shortly after departure. Ladybug quietly takes the briefcase anyway. Then the Wolf, played by Bad Bunny, decides Ladybug killed his wife at their wedding and attacks him. The Wolf dies by his own knife during the fight.
There is a lot of that. Bullet Train stacks bodies through accident and coincidence, and the running joke is that Ladybug is never the one holding the weapon when it happens.
Kimura Boards the Train
Andrew Koji plays Yuichi Kimura, called the Father. He gets on the bullet train to find whoever pushed his young son Wataru off a rooftop and left him comatose. He finds her: the Prince, a manipulative schoolgirl assassin played by Joey King.
She admits she lured him aboard to force him to kill the White Death. She holds Wataru’s life hostage through a henchman at the hospital. It is the one thread in Bullet Train with real stakes, and the film treats it as one more piece to shuffle.
Michael Shannon plays the White Death. Hiroyuki Sanada plays the Elder. Zazie Beetz is the Hornet, Logan Lerman is the Son, and Masi Oka is the Conductor. Channing Tatum and Ryan Reynolds show up uncredited, as a train passenger and as Carver. Reynolds took the cameo as thanks for Pitt’s own cameo in Deadpool 2, which Leitch also directed.
What the Train Carries
The film premiered in Paris on July 18, 2022, and opened in the United States on August 5. Principal photography began in Los Angeles in November 2020 and wrapped in March 2021, shot during the COVID-19 pandemic. It grossed $239 million against a production budget of $86–90 million.
So it made money. That is not the same as it working.
The cast is the film’s clearest strength and its clearest liability. Pitt is relaxed in a role that asks him to be the least interesting person in every scene. Henry and Taylor-Johnson have the only comic rhythm that lands. King is genuinely unsettling. The rest are deployed as types and cleared away before they can become characters.
| Element | What Bullet Train does | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| Setting | One high-speed train | Tension resets every time the film cuts away |
| Cast | Pitt, King, Taylor-Johnson, Henry, Koji, Sanada, Shannon, Bullock | Most are types, not people |
| Tone | Action comedy with a body count | Jokes undercut the few real stakes |
| Source | Kōtarō Isaka’s 2010 novel | A Japanese story told with a mostly non-Japanese cast |
The film drew mixed reviews and a whitewashing controversy over that last row. A Japanese-set adaptation with a predominantly non-Japanese ensemble is a casting choice the movie never answers. It is not a small thing to wave off.
The Mechanics of the Joke
Bullet Train runs on a simple engine: coincidence dressed as fate. The briefcase gets rigged with explosives. Yuichi’s gun gets sabotaged to blow up if fired. Lemon and Ladybug fight, Lemon goes briefly unconscious, and Ladybug drugs his water with sleeping powder to escape. Tangerine gets knocked off the train and climbs back aboard.
- The briefcase, which everyone wants and nobody keeps
- The poisoned Son, which starts the whole chain
- The Wolf’s knife, which kills the Wolf
- Yuichi’s sabotaged gun, which turns his one job into a trap
- The sleeping powder, which ends the Lemon fight without a death
Each item is a gag and a plot device at once. That is competent construction. It is also construction that never builds to anything. The film keeps introducing new killers instead of deepening the ones it has.
Where the Ride Lands
Leitch can stage a fight. The train gives him tight corridors, closing doors, and a cast that can sell a punch. What he cannot do is slow down. Every time Bullet Train threatens to mean something — a father trying to save his son, a man trying to do one job without killing anyone — it cuts to another cameo or another corpse.
The tagline promises that the end of the line is just the beginning. The film never earns that. It ends the way it runs: fast, loud, and unwilling to sit with anything it set up.
Pitt is the draw and the problem. He is playing a man who wants peace, in a movie that has no interest in peace. The performance is fine. The role is a straight man in a film with no straight lines.
Bullet Train is not a disaster. It is a well-built machine with nothing to carry. The cast is deep, the premise is clean, and the execution is all surface. Two hours of people dying by accident should be funnier, or sadder, or at least more surprising than this.
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