The trailers for Bullet Train advertised a fun, goofy, violent summer movie with charming actors and Japanese versions of American pop songs, and it delivers all of those things. What the ubiquitous YouTube ads didn’t reveal is that it’s a much smarter movie than it appears, a subtly thoughtful – well, I’d maybe stop short of calling a film where Brad Pitt fights assassins with a water bottle and Quicksilver punches a Japanese mascot a “meditation,” but it has a lot to say about luck and fate, and it uses action and comedy to do it.
A mysterious metal briefcase sits in the baggage hold of a bullet train rocketing through Japan, and a series of assassins are all vying for it. There’s The Father (Andrew Koji), a desperate man with an endangered son; Lemon and Tangerine (Brian...