The Film
I’m trying to remember the title of a movie. There’s a bomber, who puts a device on public transport. If it registers a speed over… ah I forget what the exact marker was, but anyway, that arms the bomb, then if it goes below that speed…BOOM! So the cops have to figure out who this guy is, and how to disarm the bomb. I think it was called “The bus that couldn’t slow down”, but it might have been a bit snappier than that.
That aside, 1975’s The Bullet Train definitely bears some striking similarities to, you know, that bus movie. Ken Takahara plays Okita, he’s 40, has lost his company in a bankruptcy and is recently divorced. Recruiting two friends (Kei Yamamoto and Akira Oda) to help set it up, he develops a plan to hold a bullet train with approximately 1500 passengers to ransom for $5 million in US currency.
The first 45 minutes of the film are the most like that other movie. At that point, the film is, if you’ll excuse the expression, on rails. Director Junya Satō injects breakneck pace into the narrative as he builds the picture both on the train and around it as it builds up to the 80 KM/h mark that it then can’t go below without detonating the bomb. When we’re stuck in the cab of the train with driver Aoki (Shinichi ‘Sonny’ Chiba) there is a double effectiveness as the train hurtles forward, (often shown by some effective model shots, as well as real footage of trains) but the usually unstoppable force of Chiba, so active and lethal in films like The Streetfighter or The Executioner, is trapped behind the controls of the train, unable to do much other than control the speed. Chiba fans might also notice that there is a very small part (as a telephone operator) for Sister Streetfighter herself, Etsuko Shihomi.
One place where Bullet Train scores tension points over the bus movie is in the knowledge that there is a point it can’t go beyond, we never actually see the buffers that we assume must be at its destination, but it’s implied that once the train reaches Hakata it will have no further route to travel. This barrier is always looming, and the ticking clock on reaching it is effective as the people in the control room try to put the time of reaching it back, without slowing the train too much.
The issue with the film is not that the pace of the train, it’s, eventually, the pace of the movie itself. At 152 minutes, this is something of an epic, and after a while it doesn’t have much to do on the train itself. There are some effective passages in the middle section, as cops try to identify and find the bombers, and some particularly clever evasion sequences come out of the best tradition of ’70s thrillers, but the flashbacks that fill us in on the background of the plan often slow the film to a crawl, and Okita’s motives just aren’t that necessary to know. The on train stuff in this section is bulked out with a storyline about a pregnant woman going into shock, which features some fairly ropey acting, and again doesn’t add much.
I was hoping the film might have found a way for Sonny Chiba to leave the cab and take a more active part – imagine a better version of Under Siege 2 – but sadly that doesn’t happen in thee way you’d hope. There are a few other cast members on the train whose presence is rather thrown away, notably, Eiji Gō, whose striking villainous look promises rather more from his character; a prisoner being escorted on the train in a plot point that anticipates Con Air, but doesn’t deliver the mayhem of that movie.
Things pick up again in the last half hour, with a very familiar sequence of a second train pulling level to hand over some equipment to help defuse the bomb and a sequence trying to finally chase down Okita that put me a little in mind of Kubrick’s The Killing.
Ultimately, The Bullet Train is a solid thriller at two and a half hours, but I wonder if it might have been an all time classic at two hours.
…SPEED, it was called SPEED. Can’t believe I forgot that.
★★★
The Disc and Extras
I don’t know how long I can keep saying this in different ways: Eureka again do a great job cleaning up a film that ends up looking much less than its almost 50 years, displaying solid detail and no discernible print flaws. It’s a textbook job of preserving the texture of the print.
Interestingly, given that my issues with the film revolve mainly around its pacing, there is an export cut included, which runs to just 114 minutes, but sadly is only available in an English dub. I can’t stand dubbing for live action films, but if you’re okay with it, I’m sure this will be an intriguing alternative take on the film.
Critics and Japanese cinema experts Jasper Sharp and Tom Mes provide a packed commentary, with information on everything from the cast to the cultural context of the film (the fact that much of Japan wasn’t connected by the bullet train in 1975).
Off the Rails spends 20 minutes talking to director Junya Satō’s biographers, Tatsuya Masuto and Masaaki Nomura about how their book got off the ground, and particularly about Bullet Train. Asian cinema expert Tony Rayns contributes a to camera piece which, at 26 minutes, essentially serves as a mini commentary. Cult movie historian Kim Newman is on hand for a 16 minute feature covering the history of mad bombers and bomb defusing in cinema, as ever, he’s full of enthusiasm for his subject, running through from Hitchcock’s Sabotage to Speed and The Hurt Locker and many in between.
Finally, there is an archival featurette called Big Movie, Big Panic, which appears to have been prepared for an earlier video release, and features the only interview on the disc with Junya Satō.
This is a pretty extensive selection of extras, with a good variety of voices (though they inevitably touch on similar ideas), and all well worth spending some time with.
