We had the trailer for Bullet Train: Explosion recently and it was basically ‘Speed on a Train’ or, for the more cultured, the episode of Father Ted with the milk float.
The director, Shinji Higuchi, is known for Shin Godzilla, which was a great take on the giant lizard story. This movie started well, but man, did it take a nose dive!
I’m not going to list the cast for Bullet Train: Explosion, because I’m guessing you’re not familiar with the actors, I wasn’t. They are all very good, it’s the story that’s the letdown.
The Story
As I said, Bullet Train: Explosion is Speed on a Train. We opened with a conductor who gave a tour of the train to some schoolchildren. We meet others passengers who are boarding the train and ready to head to Tokyo.
As the train sets off and then there’s a call saying there is a bomb on the train. If it goes under 100km, the bomb will explode. To prove the point, there is another bomb on a freight train that is set off.
When all this happens, it’s a bit anticlimactic. Everyone just seems to shrug and get on with it. I expected more, but I don’t know, it was very lacklustre. The bomber is demanding 100,000,000 yen to disarm the bomb.
Anyway, the rest of the movie is as you’d expect. The train staff try and stay on top of things, with the passengers all having their own little subplots.
The set-up is nice, all the people seem nice, and it seems like a good intro. Then we find out who the bomber is.
*Spoilers*
I’m going to spoil the story, because it really made me mad! Bullet Train: Explosion, to a point, is mildly entertaining. The characters are interesting enough to keep you engaged, but then you learn who the bomber is.
Before I spoil it, I’m going to mention Speed. In Speed, the movie opens with a failed bombing, which was supposed to be Dennis Hopper’s retirement plan. Dennis then spends time getting his revenge and money.
Dennis’s character is very clever, knows about explosives and covers all his bases. He’s an ex-cop or feels he was ripped off but the government and was angry about it. He’s got a camera on the bus to keep an eye on everything. He manages to rig the bus with the explosive device. How? I don’t know, but it looked like it worked. He had a plan, and he executed it well; if it wasn’t for that pesky Keanu Reeves.
In Bullet Train: Explosion, the bomber is a 15-year-old schoolgirl. I completely checked out when this was revealed, because she was a 15-year-old schoolgirl who was on the train. There are several issues that were not addressed in the script.
The first question that pops up is: Where on earth does a school kid get enough explosives to blow up a train? It turns out she was friends with a guy at a local quarry, which is how she got the explosives. OK, this is weird, but OK.
However, it doesn’t explain things like one of the bombs (as there are several) is underneath the train and is triggered if it goes under 100km. How on god’s green earth did they manage to get it under the train?
Conductor: Excuse me, why are you on the track with the train coming?
School girl: Umm, I wanted to see under the train real quick.
There was no way that device could have been placed under the train, and not just on one of the carriages, but all of them, well, all but one.
Also, I get that the girl and the guy could make the explosive, but how did they create the device to go off at under 100km? Wind speed? Guess work? Magic? It made zero sense and was not explained.
Daddy Issues
The entire bomb thing was just the tip of the iceberg; the young girl wanted revenge for someone blowing up her mother. They show a clip from 1975 of a bomb going off, but then I got confused.
That can’t have been her mother blowing up, that would make her older than me! The clip was to show that this new bomber was using the same MO, but why not show her mother dying? Wouldn’t that have made more sense to the story?
They rescue some of the passengers, apart from 9 people, including the girl. The girl blows her dad up, who she thought of as a whiny bitch. Then they are told, they can disarm the bomb if someone kills the girl.
How? Because she has a heart monitor linked to the bomb! Again, how? Who did that operation, Dr Nick Riveria? She has a heart condition, which is killing her anyway, but when did she get someone to fit a device that can explode a bomb?
The second half of the movie took a nose dive worse than Star Wars and Star Trek franchises combined.
Overall
Bullet Train: Explosion was a half-decent idea, but the story is one of the worst things I’ve seen in a while. The more I think about it, the more annoyed it is. Foreign movies aren’t supposed to be like Hollywood.
It seems like Japan want to make movies like Hollywood. They are doing this by writing utterly stupid stories that make zero sense if you give them more than a glancing thought. Don’t do that, Japan, you’ve made some amazing movies. Godzilla: Minus One showed us how Godzilla should be done.
The first half of Bullet Train: Explosion is solid enough, but after the ‘Martha Moment’, I just checked out. I did manage to drag myself to the end, but the more I thought about it, the more annoyed I got.
I could understand the girl taking a bomb on the train in her backpack. The conductor says that the train is thoroughly checked before departure, apart from the several bombs underneath it.
All of the carriages seem to have speed-controlled bombs under them, apart from one, car number 8, which has the main protagonists on. Why? Don’t know. As I said, the more I think about it, I’m going from annoyed to angry.
I give Bullet Train: Explosion another 0 stars out of 5. 2025 is turning into a dumpster fire of a year for ‘entertainment’.
