Bullet Train Explosion Is A Charmingly Silly Disaster Movie
Yes, it’s Speed on a bullet train, but it’s also both more and less than that.
It’s tempting to describe Bullet Train Explosion as a spiritual successor to Speed, but the truth is that Speed itself was the copycat. Twenty years before Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock got trapped on that runaway bus, a Japanese film titled The Bullet Train introduced a similar premise: Held to ransom by an anonymous bomber, a crowded passenger train will explode if it slows below 80 km/h. Directed by Shinji Higuchi (Shin Godzilla; Shin Ultraman), Netflix's new remake increases the minimum speed to 100 km/h, committing to an engagingly silly type of disaster movie.
Within the first few minutes, you begin to wonder if you’re watching undisguised propaganda for the East Japan Railway Company. By the halfway point of the film, there should be no doubt in your mind whatsoever. Despite the fact that this story revolves around train-related peril, Bullet Train Explosion makes sure to highlight the dazzling professionalism of the railway company's workforce, and the many high-tech safety protocols they employ.
As soon as the news breaks that there’s a bomb onboard a speeding Shinkansen, a team of sleekly-uniformed experts swings into action, troubleshooting obstacles and figuring out the best route to keep the targeted train from slowing down. In a situation room full of industrious chatter and blinking LEDs, they periodically use little model trains to illustrate how they’ll execute the next daring escape. (As someone with a poor sense of direction, I found this satisfyingly helpful, much like how James Cameron begins Titanic with a present-day video explaining how the big crash will eventually unfold.)
On the bullet train itself, one of the conductors (Tsuyoshi Kusanagi) makes his mark as an unlikely hero. You might assume that his job revolves around thankless customer service, but as he explains to a group of visiting schoolkids in the opening act, he enjoys the opportunity to help people from all walks of life. "Though each of us has our own private reasons for boarding," he says, waxing poetic about the romance of rail travel. "We're all heading in the same direction." When disaster strikes, he reacts with stalwart moral backbone, becoming the train’s de facto leader while the driver is stuck in her cabin at the front.
Bullet Train Explosion is full of stalwart heroes and dazzling displays of bureaucratic brilliance.
Aside from the enigmatic terrorist villain, our main antagonists are — in the classic traditions of the disaster genre — individuals whose selfish motives put the general public in danger. Playing with some amusingly unsubtle archetypes, this includes a ruthless civil servant who refuses to negotiate on the passengers’ behalf, an obnoxious millionaire influencer, and a scandal-prone politician. As panic begins to spread along the train, they soon become catalysts for further chaos.
Filmmaker Shinji Higuchi is already familiar with this type of material, best known for co-directing the idiosyncratic Shin Godzilla — a satirical kaiju movie that centers on the government taskforce handling Tokyo's latest Godzilla attack. Bullet Train Explosion embraces a similarly logistics-focused format, but it espouses a less cynical viewpoint. In this story the authorities (aside from a couple of slimy elected officials) are well-meaning and ingenious, doing their utmost to save civilian lives. It would certainly make an interesting double bill with the American action thriller The Runaway Train (1985), which combines an overlapping set-up with a much uglier view of human nature, and depicts the Amtrak system as a poorly-maintained death trap.
A bullet train, exploding.
For a movie with the word “explosion” in the title, Bullet Train Explosion is relatively light on large-scale action. However that isn't necessarily a problem, as most of the tension stems from interpersonal conflicts and the ticking-clock nature of the emergency. How long can the train maintain its speed? Can they locate the bombs before it reaches Tokyo, risking many more lives if it explodes?
These ideas obviously aren’t breaking new ground in the disaster genre, but there's something to be said for a self-aware action movie that prioritizes everyday heroes, in a scenario where cops and soldiers are functionally irrelevant. Compared to Netflix’s dismal roster of faux blockbusters starring Hollywood A-listers like Chris Evans and the Rock, Bullet Train Explosion also has a lot more charm. Making the most of a larger-than-life premise and a likable leading man, its only real issue is a slightly overlong runtime, spending a little too long on the final act of a story that is — let’s be real here — not serious enough to warrant an elaborate denouement.
