The speed of a Tarantino film with barely any of the wit and the bustle of a Soderbergh film with barely any of the charm, Bullet Train is adequately amateur, comparable to any top 40 junk that slides into your ears in July and out of your brain by August.

It's equal parts hard for me to complain about and hard for me to praise because it's so comfortably milquetoast. I can't deny the hard work it takes to put a feature film together with big name actors and stuntwork and large sets and everything like that. I also can't deny how bored I was watching most of the movie, stonefacedly sandbagging every quip or flashback hurtled my way. It isn't that I hate fun, but there's no substitute for the real thing and this movie just goes to show it.

Does anybody else remember the video game Wet? It came out in 2009 and had Eliza Dushku voicing the main character. The whole thing had this film grain grindhouse thing going on, obviously inspired by the revival of the style that was appropriately named Grindhouse that Tarantino and Rodriguez put out in 2007. The game reviewed decently even though a lot of people complained about its repetitive nature, but more importantly is that it didn't sell very well. Blame poor advertising, blame a saturated market, or blame unoriginality. My point is: it's the kind of game I wanted to like because it pays homage to a lot of other things I like, but itself is a sort of husk. No real identity.

Bullet Train is the exact same way. The second the fast talking dialogue hit, I could sniff it out. It's missing some key component, it's hard to say what exactly, but I could just feel it. It's almost like it's too much, trying to overcompensate for its own lack of originality. One word kept popping into my head: noisy. It's not that it's so fast paced because it needs somewhere to go quickly, I mean the movie is like two and a half hours long and keeps dragging its feet, more that it's trying to distract you by quickly switching gears so you won't notice that barely anything is happening.

It's got a music video kind of charm to its best sequences. For all I complained about, I think the edit is tight even considering the runtime. There are plenty of unimportant bits that could've been cut, but the actual structure of scenes and pacing maintained by the edit flows nicely. But it was not enough to save my interest.