Every country has their IP. The US has superheroes and video games. India has their ancient texts. The UK has Shakespeare and Austen. And Japan has Godzilla…and Shinkansen. Bullet Train Explosion takes Speed‘s inspiration from a 1975 Japanese film, and updates it for the 50th anniversary. Now that’s some good IP! Side note: it did make me chuckle thinking about some Latvian kid making Flow 2 in 2074, that now classic Latvian IP.
Hayabusa 5060B, a shinkansen starting from Aomori, leaves the station, bound for Tokyo. Right after the departure, a freight train blows up. The anonymous bomber calls the Japanese Railway (JR) East manager Yuichi Kasagi (Takumi Saitoh), and and informs them that there are bombs on the 5060B, which will blow up if the train drops below 100 km/hr. Kasagi informs the government, who works on the side, while the Hayabusa conductor Kazuya Takaichi (Tsuyoshi Kusanagi), driver (Non) and, deputy conductor Keiji Fujii (Kanata Hosoda) try to keep order on the shinkansen. Not easy, since onboard are some school kids (Hana Toyoshima is one of them), maligned politician Yuko Kagami (Machiko Ono), and an influencer millionaire Mitsuru Todoroki (Jun Kaname), who are likely to panic and go right to social media to cause a further ruckus.
For a while Bullet Train Explosion moves as fast as the train itself, to the movie’s benefit. Director Shinji Higuchi is no stranger to big films (he’s done a Godzilla movie), so for at least the first hour he sets up the situation wonderfully for the audience to follow. With the Speed set up, and Tokyo our looming end of the line bad news scenario, Higuchi designs a series of fun complicated enough problems for the 5060B to deal with. Using Kasagi and other government representatives, we see toy trains set up the scenario our bigger train is going to have to deal with, and then we spend 10-15 minutes dealing with the latest problem. As expected, there’s other trains on tracks, explosions, duplicity on the inside, and maybe a chance at a daring rescue or two. Like all actions movies it’s in league with, Bullet Train Explosion is best when it’s diving into the details of an escape/rescue, and all the machinations that go to making sure all these people stay alive. The ending is also wonderfully insane, delivering on the big finale promised by the title.
The reason Higuchi was brought into Bullet Train Explosion though was for what he did on Shin Gozilla. While the lizard battles were great, the movie was so beloved because of its commentary on Japan’s current state of affairs between the government and it’s citizens. The director applies that same hard lens here, but with more mixed results. The bureaucracy angle works as effectively as it did in Shin Godzilla, with the uneasy alliance between various government bureaucracies not exactly firing on all cylinders. On the train are also some interesting commentaries on who is worth saving, and if there’s some sort of cutoff depending on your likability, plus how say, a socially dependent person might use this crisis to push their “altruism.” After the headcount is sliced to the major players, the story gets a little lost with a different angle it goes for that slows down the movie too much for the point to land, but thankfully as soon as that’s over, we’re in endgame territory.
What I learned most from Bullet Train Explosion is that we need more Speed knockoffs. Can you imagine one of those scooter’s gone crazy films during rush hour? Or a motorcycle situation? Or some sort of racecar related version on a track with other drivers? Come on Netflix, it’s all right there for you: just pick a different country each time, and you’ll probably have a banger, or at least a trashy perfect streamer for people to leave on until the explosions hit.