Bullet Train

Bullet Train presents the peculiar case of a film that assembles a strikingly multiethnic ensemble cast while maintaining almost complete indifference to the social implications of such a choice. The movie features actors of various racial and ethnic backgrounds—Brian Tyree Henry, Andrew Koji, Hiroyuki Sanada, and Bad Bunny among them—yet treats this diversity as mere happenstance, a product of assembling assassins from "around the globe" with no particular investment in what that phrase might signify. The director and screenwriter have acknowledged the whitewashing concerns surrounding the casting of predominantly non-Japanese actors in a story set in Japan, but the film itself offers no commentary on this tension. The characters exist in a vacuum of cultural awareness, their backgrounds serving purely as costume pieces.

The film's ideological posture is fundamentally apolitical, content to be nothing more than an action comedy about criminals shooting at one another on a train. There is no feminist agenda to speak of, no LGBTQ representation, no climate consciousness, no examination of class struggle, and no particular interest in neurodivergent representation beyond the central conceit that the protagonist suffers from bad luck. The screenplay has no interest in interrogating the structures within which these assassins operate, treating capitalism and violence as the mere furniture of entertainment rather than systems worthy of examination.

What we encounter is a 2022 film that has inherited contemporary casting practices without inheriting contemporary sensibilities. It is diverse in form while remaining inert in substance, a movie that demonstrates how easily multicultural casting can be deployed as visual texture while actual engagement with social consciousness remains entirely optional. The film succeeds as spectacle and fails utterly as cultural commentary, which is to say it succeeds entirely according to its own modest ambitions.