'Bullet Train' Earns Mixed Reviews from Critics: Brad Pitt 'Shines' But Movie Goes 'Off the Rails'

Mar. 15, 2025

Bullet Trainis earning praise for starBrad Pitt, but critics are split over the film overall.

The David Leitch-directed action-comedy, which hurtles into theaters Friday, stars Pitt, 58, as an assassin who has just recovered from a case of burnout, returning to his high-stakes job with a somewhat misguided sense of confidence about his fitness for duty. The plot follows competing assassins fighting to the death on a high-speed train.

Entertainment Weekly’s Leah Greenblatt gave the “gleeful neon thriller” a B+, saying it “largely delivers on the high-speed berserkery of its premise.”

“It also feels looser and more inclusive than many films in the genre, owing as much to the lush eye-popping absurdity ofEverything Everywhere All at Onceas it does the crasser testosterone antics ofKingsmen,The Gentlemenet al,” she says.

And while Greenblatt believes the film is “maybe 20 minutes too long,” she said Leitch, 46, “embarks on a series of adrenalized set pieces that defy logic and physics so breezily that its relentless, ridiculous violence plays more like a winsome ballet.”

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Brad Pitt and Sandra Bullock inBullet Train(2022).Scott Garfield

Ross Bonaime wrote in his review forColliderthatBullet Trainis “big, absurd and a lot of fun,” noting that it also seems self-aware and “poking fun at how convoluted and wild [it] is going to get” at one point in the dialogue.

“But whenBullet Trainstarts to explore the larger meaning of everything, that’s when it starts to go off the rails,” he noted.

IndieWire’s David Ehrlich praised Pitt, saying he “shines” — but the film overall is “an action-packed star vehicle that goes nowhere fast,” serving as “a remarkable testament to the actor’s batting average over the last 30 years, and some of the best evidence we have as to why he’s been synonymous with the movies themselves for that entire time.”

Brad Pitt inBullet Train(2022).Scott Garfield

“Bullet Trainis not a good film, but Pitt is having a truly palpable amount of fun in it, and the energy that radiates off of him as he fightsBad Bunnyover an explosive briefcase or styles his hair with the blow dryer function of a Japanese toilet is somehow magnetic enough to convince us that we’re having fun, too,” Ehrlich added.

“[Pitt’s character] Ladybug is constantly quoting trite self-help aphorisms, which invariably get a laugh,” wrote Peter Debruge forVariety. “This may be a fun enough ride, but such punchlines drive home that neither the characters nor the film they inhabit are particularly deep. Quite the opposite, in fact. As Calvin and Hobbes so aptly put it, their train of thought is still boarding at the station.”

Alongside Pitt and Bad Bunny, 28,Bullet Trainalso starsBrian Tyree Henry,Sandra Bullock,Joey King,Logan Lerman,Zazie BeetzandAaron Taylor-Johnson. The film is based on Kōtarō Isaka’sbook of the same name.

Leitchrecently toldGQabout collaborating with Pitt on the movie, “In the conversations I had with Brad, the No. 1 goal was to make a movie that’s entertaining and escapist and fresh and original, that will make people want to come back to the theater.”

Additionally, Henry, 40, said they had a lot of funon set making the movie: “What I remember mostly is the laughter.”

“Brad’s laugh is really infectious,” he added. “He brings this kind of ease to set where there’s nothing overworked. You’re sitting across from a master class of cool.”

Bullet Trainzooms into theaters Friday.

source: people.com