David Leitch, director of
Deadpool 2
, exercises his talents in an offbeat thriller.
He embarks with him Brad Pitt for his big return to the cinema since his Oscar for best supporting role in Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood
,
by Quentin Tarantino in 2020. In
Bullet Train,
the Hollywood star embodies a somewhat nerdy criminal with long hair and big glasses.
Action scenes with stunts coexist with the plot of a crazy comedy and transport us aboard a Japanese train launched at high speed.
Bullet Train, the “train-bullet” is a direct reference to the Shinkansen, literally the “fast train like the bullet” which crosses the archipelago.
But do you have to get on board?
“Beneath its whimsical, even schoolboy exterior,
Bullet Train
demonstrates an impressive mastery of space and time.
Fans of tortillards and other "slow trains" will pass their turn.
The others will take a ticket for this delightful roller coaster, the ideal summer blockbuster, ”
said Étienne Sorin in the columns of
Le Figaro
.
Pleasure shared by Caroline Vié in
20 minutes
.
"
The director mixes dark humor and breathtaking action like a Quentin Tarantino on steroids,
" she explains.
Brad Pitt is irresistibly funny as an unlucky assassin stuck on an express train with fearsome murderers.
Read alsoOur review of
Bullet Train
: Brad Pitt or the hard life
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The film also captivates Marianne Leroux of France Info
,
who judges that
"despite certain lengths,
Bullet Train
keeps us in suspense until the end thanks to the many fight scenes (which can sometimes be quite violent) and the various gags which punctuate the film".
“We get out of the clichés and we let ourselves go with curiosity to know the story of each one.
All without ever getting bored (or almost)”,
she greets.
Like Michel Valentin, from Le
Parisien,
who describes
Bullet Train
as
“a breathtaking film between humor and violence”.
For those looking for entertainment,
Bullet Train
does the job.
But should we see anything else?
Not according to Catherine Painset for
La Voix du Nord.
Bullet Train,
as entertaining as it is, is
“just as perfectly futile”,
she judges.
Launched at more than 500 km/hour, the film mixes (voluntarily) abstruse dialogues, epileptic action scenes, ultra-violence, convoluted story, second degree, noisy music and colorful characters.
A direct legacy of Tarantino's cinema, which sometimes borders on the big puppet but ends up achieving its goal.
It's perfectly entertaining, and just as perfectly pointless."
Julien Barcilon of
Télé 7 Jours
also evokes a
“action film with the look of an ultra-violent, fun, regressive cartoon, with claimed borrowings from Tarantino's barren, wild and pop cinema.
Less genius.”
Indigestion is sometimes not far away.
“A post-Guy Ritchie porridge (in better film), puffing out all the racks of pop cynicism and uninhibited violence for manga fans, with no idea other than a vague meta humor as stupid as it is inconsistent,
Bullet Train
arises there”
, writes Nicolas Schaller.
For the critic of
L'Obs
,
"even Brad Pitt, rather amusing in imitation-Dude (the character of Jeff Bridges in
The Big Lebowski),
ends up being drunk."
Drunk like a teenage drinking binge, asserts Antoine Desrues, critic at
Large Screen.
Lazy, and unable to exploit its rather intriguing concept,
Bullet Train
is yet another infuriating Deadpoolo-tarantine-esque action flick,
he deems.
Brad Pitt and David Leitch have fun on a few sequences, but everything is weighed down by his irony, supposed to compensate for the stupidity of a scenario torched by an alcoholic high school student.
Be careful not to step down.
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