Popquiz, Hot Shot: There’s a Bomb on a Culture. If the Shinkansen drops below 100 kilometers per hour, it inflates. What are you doing? What are you doing!?
Well one thing you not do is confuse “Bullet Train Explosion“For a” speed “recording in a country with a functional public transport system. For one thing, this elegant Netflix Spectacle is actually a new recording by Ken Takakura/Sonny Chiba vehicle 1975 inspired “Speed“Although” The Bullet Train “in itself was a response to American disaster films such as” Earthquake “and” The Towering Inferno “(pour one for free trade).
For another thing, Shinji Higuchi’s Glossy New Version – as Fawning Toward The East Japan Railway Company as the “Shin Godzilla” Director’s Kaiju Movies have been skeptical of the japanese government – isn’t fueled by unleaded suspense People Maintain Their Professionalism and Morality Decycy in the Midst Situation That Could Rocket Off the Rails at any moment.
The strength of such ”Piste“-Level Competence Porn Makes It Easy to Forgive” The Bullet Train Explosion “Its Penchant for Corporate Propaganda, as there are Probly More nefarious things on netflix than a two-Hour Commercial for a Train Company that IT PRIDES ITESLFS ITSELF Like veteran train condual cazuya takaichi (The Iron-jwed tsuyoshi kusanagi), whose love affair with the Railroad is the only romantic friction this film Ever need.
First, waxing poetically introduced to a group of high school students (“Although each of us has our own reasons for boarding the Shinkanesen, we are all heading in the same direction,” he smiles when the music swells behind him), Takaichi -an considers the train as a sacred expression of human solidarity. So when an unknown terrorist phones in a bomb threat that risks turning passengers aboard his Hayabusa 60 against each other, Takaichi can’t help but see the situation as a sacred war for everything he believes in.
The passengers themselves-a unlikely colorful and high-profile connection of characters-aunts more practical views on the issue, whose details are noticed when an arrogant bureaucrat from the Prime Minister’s office commands that Takaichi informs everyone aboard the shinans that it is wired to blow. Head of Jr. East’s valuable customers is High Doctor Mitsuru Todoroki (Jun Kaname), which is known for writing a book called “The Youncesvigationed Millionaire” and immediately decides to throw himself as the protagonist in the crisis at hand, and the national dietary member Yuko Kagami (Machi (Machik (Machiko National Diet Yuko Kagami (Machiko Ono), who sees that incident as a chance to be distracted from the national diet Yuko Kagami (Machiko Ono), which sees that incident as a chance to be distracted from the national diet Yuko Kagami (Machiko Ono Skely nycheched Anna Skand.
There is also an old electrician (Naomasa Musaka) whose dissatisfied wife excited him awake from a nap when shit hits the fan (“Honey, this is your chance to be useful!”), A glowing man with a guilty conscience, and the whole class of teenagers who met Takaichi as part of a field early. None of these people are particularly nuanced or convincing, but none of them deserve to die on a fleeting shink dance when it screams at the heart of Tokyo, a fact that is relevant to the terrorist’s ransom requires: they require $ 698 million, with the abduction that the cash must be audience from all over Japan.
It is a hefty sum, but the villain never expects to get it. On the contrary, they intention Not to – they would rather prove that people do not really care about each other, and that basic empathy, the type that Takaichi shows every one of his passengers (even the assholes), is just an empty form of public theater to convince people of their own goodness. Maybe they should have directed Amtrak instead.
Of course, it would be difficult to arrange a high-octane thriller on a fragile Acela that never goes more than 40 km / h, and the big sales point for “Bullet Train Explosion”-which requires a lot of pain to reward fans of the 1975 original, but never requires the viewers to be the least acquainted with the previous film-to do so that the Jr. The action sequences are too saturated with CGI to take advantage of such a fully authorized verisimilitude (permission to use real cultivation does not make it easier to arrange a rescue attempt to almost half the sound of sound, much that I would love for Tom Cruise to prove me wrong one day), but Jr East’s approval gives a tactifier.
It also makes it so much easier to believe that “Take of Pelham 123” scales where the company’s Storwigs compete to construct a clear road for the train when it burns across the countryside. The government’s stooges can try rubber up the work, but the train company’s loyal employees will do everything to ensure that “no surgery comes before passenger safety!”
With what the film’s prevailing ethos, there is no chance for “Bullet Train Explosion” to maintain any traces of the average streak that went through the original in 1975, or of the cutting satire that defines so much of Higuchi’s previous work. Even when the Shinkansen relaxes some of their cars at full speed and performs death changes of death tracks to avoid crashing in other trains, it never really feels like something is meaningful in risk zone, and Higuchi’s market pieces are rarely intense to compensate the lack of danger baked in this project from the beginning. This makes it even more difficult to swallow the villain’s evil plan (which is very outlandish to begin with), even though their playoffs introduces a smart new challenge for Takaichi’s corporate stoicism.
Nevertheless, it is low in its own right to see the crew maintain their integrity even when the train they work together begins to lose their own; Seeing them so loyally serving the common good even if a bad guy who has been conditioned to think that no one really cares about it in the first place. “Bullet Train Explosion” may not offer anything near To the tension of “speed” (despite it moving much faster), but it makes Takaichi proud by getting the job done, despite his mistakes.
Rating: C+
“Bullet Train Explosion” will be available to stream on Netflix from Wednesday, April 23.
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