The irony of “Bullet Train” (2022) is that it takes about 20 minutes too long to get to its destination. Not that it’s a bad movie, if you can get beyond the implausibility of a multiple-assassin showdown on Japanese public transit. (And also close your eyes to the increasingly ridiculous violations of the laws of physics.) Hapless Brad Pitt’s Zen-fueled express ride through the valley of death has the same joie de vivre that makes Guy Ritchie’s and Quentin Tarantino’s films darkly absurd instead of darkly grotesque. Unfortunately, it gets to be too talky and twisted, requiring an overlong untangling.
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Four families become partially intertwined in a series of tragedies in “Babel” (2006). Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu had just become a big-deal filmmaker and appears to have been given full artistic freedom to do something that completely went over my head. It’s pornographically sad, as one bad decision leads to the next until the ripples reach around the globe. Ultimately, however, there’s no coherent story pulling it all together. Inarritu tosses a bunch of partially developed thoughts into a blender and lazily jumps backward and forward in time. The noise it makes is like – oh, I see what he did there.
In the middle of “The Devil’s Own” (1997), Brad Pitt mentions that a story he just told doesn’t have a happy ending because it’s not an American story, it’s an Irish one. I’ll let you find out for yourself which kind of story this film is, but the ending disappointed me. An IRA commander (Pitt) goes undercover in the U.S., living with a cop (Harrison Ford) and his idyllic, Irish-American family while trying to conclude an arms deal. There’s plenty of great performances amidst the irony (wife Margaret Colin particularly shines), but the plot doesn’t go out with a bang.
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