• Rating:
A train racing at 350 km/h between Tokyo and Kyoto, seven killers on board, lots of kicks and punches, spectacular stunts, twists, ultra-pop aesthetics. The director of Atomic Blonde definitely deserves a chance, and the new work starts with great premises. A top-notch action comedy, frenetic rhythm, and skillful use of images. Every now and then, there's even a general laugh in the theater.
In the first few minutes, we are bombarded with tons of hyperkinetic sequences, super fast, more or less serious digressions, stories of Japanese mafia, gangsters who made their own way only to succumb to the treachery of a traitor. Stories of wounded fathers seeking redemption, husbands left alone who cannot find peace, stories of killers who seem to have discovered wisdom, assassin brothers, or supposed ones (the comedic duo), caught between a rock and a hard place. The diegetic engines driving the characters' actions revolve around two themes: revenge (of fathers, daughters, spouses) and the need to finish a job to save their skin.
Leitch makes his own a definitely juicy story and proves himself a skilled puppet master. In the sense that the protagonists are finely crafted comedic masks (script by Zak Olkewicz, unknown to me) interacting in a somewhat mechanical way. Each has a goal, and clashing with others on the train, they have to ensure they reach it despite the rivals' resistance. It’s a game that might seem cloying, but here the richness of adventures, misunderstandings, always malicious interventions of fate, action flights with pounding blows, and alchemies between people who don't know each other are so vast and well-structured that one cannot but applaud for the scenic construction. It's a continuous play of narrative puzzles and action virtuosity. Quite a lot indeed.
But there's a turning point, and not in a positive way. After over an hour of tooth-crunching, chases, blackmail, disguises, historical or comedic digressions, one starts losing the thread. At the umpteenth encounter between killers (who in this case don't know each other), at the umpteenth dialogue full of lies and imaginative reconstructions, I realized I couldn't remember what happened to that guy they were talking about on the screen. It’s a sign.
Too much narrative matter, which, however well-crafted, at some point reaches saturation. Moreover, these are ultimately plots without great depth, there isn't a strong dramatic or tragic connotation making them memorable (apart from a couple of cases). So after a while, one starts forgetting, it becomes an ever more indigestible and almost indistinct whirl. Anything could happen, and we wouldn’t be surprised anyway.
Maybe Leitch knows this, and towards the end, he inserts some slower and more dramatic breaks. True feelings peek into the story, but we are too anesthetized by the trainload of blows and killings preceding. Moreover, the skill in building comic caricatures isn’t matched in the work on the more tragic events, those representing the true drive towards revenge. Ultimately, the director can't take himself too seriously, and even the most formidable villain doesn’t really shake us in the end.
The construction is still accurate, there isn't a true collapse. It's the spectator (or perhaps me) who, after so many choreographies of death (perfect, entertaining), asks for something different. Perhaps the director, who has talent, still has to learn a little lesson: if you're asked for action to the max, maybe the only way to satisfy the audience is through subtraction, removing something and focusing on maximizing the key moments. Tarantino comes to mind, from which something is indeed borrowed here. But Leitch perhaps doesn’t remember that the best part of Kill Bill isn't the first (which, anyway, isn’t all fights), but the second, when feelings hurt more than any katana.
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