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The Guardian - Culture Edit Unfollow Bullet Train review: Brad Pitt choo-chooses badly with runaway vehicle by Peter Bradshaw Aug 2, 2022 All off-board for this sub-Guy Ritchie clanger in which Pitt plays a gonzo hitman outwitting quirky killers in the service of Sandra Bullock Let’s hope the estimable Brad Pitt isn’t giving us his leading-man swansong with this weirdly exhausting and overwhelmingly unfunny gonzo-violent action comedy set on a Japanese bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto – with the film’s frantically hyperactive tempo cranked up in homage to the locomotive speed. This film would be an awful way for Pitt’s performance career to hit the buffers and he is given lines like: “He follows me around like … something witty.” It’s a semi-westwashed version of the bestselling 2010 novel by Japanese author Kotoro Isaka, and directed by David (Deadpool 2) Leitch, all about a bunch of wacky assassins aboard the train, their murderous destinies all chaotically colliding, and all turning out to have more to do with each other than they think. With the whip-pans and crash zooms, the sudden flashbacks, the voiceovers, stylised punchups, shootings and stabbings and inter titles introducing the zany characters and geezer crims – two of whom are cockneys and serious West Ham fans - this is worryingly like something by Guy Ritchie. (Although Brad Pitt’s eccentric performance as a traveller in Ritchie’s film Snatch is better than anything here.) Pitt himself, in goofy bucket-hat, nerdy glasses and superannuated surfer dude gear, plays a laidback hitman codenamed “ladybug” whose handler (Sandra Bullock) gives him an easy job, to ease him back into the game after an uproarious series of calamities in previous missions. Continue reading... Continue Reading Irma Vep review – Alicia Vikander is 'pure evil but in a sexy kind of way' by Emine Saner Aug 2, 2022 The Oscar-winner stars as a velvet-catsuited villainess in this series about a film about a series of films – but while it may be headspinningly meta, it is also fun, witty and a total visual treat Mira Harberg (Alicia Vikander), an actor, zips through Paris in a car after the premiere of her latest movie, an inane sci-fi blockbuster. “I thought it was kind of OK,” says her assistant, Regina. Mira laughs in disbelief. At least it’s the final premiere, and it has brought her to France, away from a failed relationship, and where she is about to start shooting a new project. Something worthy and arty and European – a remake of the (real) 1915 Louis Feuillade serial, Les Vampires. Irma Vep (Sky Atlantic/Now) is a fun, spiky eight-part series that is so meta it makes my head hurt. Mira’s character in the arthouse remake is Irma Vep, a velvet-catsuited villainess and part of the criminal gang known as the Vampires – “pure evil but in a sexy kind of way”, as René Vidal (Vincent Macaigne), the director, explains to her. Irma Vep also happens to be the real-life name of a1996 film by Olivier Assayas, who has written and directed this show. Here, René also made an earlier Irma Vep film and married its star, as did Assayas, who married the actor Maggie Cheung, who played Vep in his 1996 film. Yes, meta all the way. Continue reading... Continue Reading

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