Bullet Train

David Leitch holds the camera inside the carriages almost to the end, turning the action into a run of two person problems the width of an aisle. The director has said the confinement forced him to rethink the fights, so they are assembled out of things that genuinely sit on a train, a kettle, a laptop, a water bottle, while the quiet car rule is used for physical comedy rather than suspense. Each new killer boards with a short backstory attached, meaning the story pauses on a schedule, and Brad Pitt’s man is written as someone trying not to fight at all, with the jokes resting on his refusal to escalate. The train was a Los Angeles stage build. Three cars were constructed for real, LED walls roughly thirty metres long stood on either side playing back the Japanese landscape, and the rig hung from a track and dolly system so it could slide to whichever car was shooting. Kōtarō Isaka, who wrote the source novel, defended the casting by saying his characters are not real people and may not even be Japanese. A good fit if you want fights choreographed around what is actually on board. Not a fit if you came for the Tokyo of the book; the country outside the windows was played back on screens.