Pop quiz, hot shot: There’s a bomb on a bullet train. If the Shinkansen drops below 100 kilometers per hour, it blows up. What do you do? What do you do!?
Well, one thing you don’t do is confuse “The Bullet Train Explosion” for a “Speed” remake set in a country with a functional public transportation system. For one thing, this sleek Netflix spectacle is actually a remake of the 1975 Ken Takakura/Sonny Chiba vehicle that inspired “Speed,” even though “The Bullet Train” was itself a response to American disaster films like “Earthquake” and “The Towering Inferno” (pour one out for free trade).
For another thing, Shinji Higuchi’s glossy new version — as fawning toward the East Japan Railway Company as the “Shin Godzilla” director’s kaiju movies have been skeptical of the Japanese government — isn’t fueled by unleaded suspense so much as it is by the sheer thrill of seeing people maintain their professionalism and moral decency in the midst situation that could rocket off the rails at any moment.
The strength of such “Pitt”-level competence porn makes it easy to forgive “The Bullet Train Explosion” its penchant for corporate propaganda, as there are probably more nefarious things on Netflix than a two-hour commercial for a train company that prides itself on the integrity of its employees. Employees like veteran train conductor Kazuya Takaichi (the iron-jawed Tsuyoshi Kusanagi), whose love affair with the railroad is the only romantic friction this film ever needs.
First introduced waxing poetic to a group of high school students (“Although each of us has our own reasons for boarding the Shinkanesen, we’re all heading in the same direction,” he smiles as the music swells behind him), Takaichi-san regards train travel as a sacred expression of human solidarity. So when an unknown terrorist phones in a bomb threat that risks turning the passengers aboard his Hayabusa 60 against one another, Takaichi can’t help but see the situation as a holy war for everything he believes in.
The passengers themselves — an improbably colorful and high-profile clutch of characters — adopt more practical views on the matter, the specifics of which are brought to their attention when an arrogant bureaucrat from the Prime Minister’s office commands that Takaichi inform everyone aboard the Shinkansen that it’s wired to blow. Chief among JR East’s precious customers are loudmouth novelist Mitsuru Todoroki (Jun Kaname), who’s famous for writing a book called “The Unemployed Millionaire” and immediately decides to cast himself as the main character of the crisis at hand, and National Diet member Yuko Kagami (Machiko Ono), who seizes on the incident as a chance to distract from a vaguely sketched recent scandal of some kind.
There’s also an old electrician (Naomasa Musaka) whose disgruntled wife excitedly smacks him awake from a nap when shit hits the fan (“Honey, this is your chance to be useful!”), a glowering man with a guilty conscience, and the entire class of teenagers who met with Takaichi as part of a field trip early that day. None of these people are particularly nuanced or compelling, but none of them deserve to die on a runaway Shinkansen as it screams toward the heart of Tokyo, a fact relevant to the terrorist’s ransom demands: They require $698 million dollars, with the caveat that the cash has to be crowd-sourced from the entire population of Japan.
That’s a hefty sum, but the villain never expects to get it. On the contrary, they intend not to — they’d rather prove that people don’t really care about each other, and that basic empathy, the kind that Takaichi shows every single one of his passengers (even the assholes), is just an empty form of public theater to convince people of their own goodness. Maybe they should have targeted Amtrak instead.
Of course, it would be hard to stage a high-octane thriller on a rickety Acela that never goes more than 40mph, and the big selling point of “The Bullet Train Explosion” — which takes great pains to reward fans of the 1975 original, but never requires viewers to be the least bit familiar with the previous film — is that JR East allowed Higuchi rare permission to shoot on a real Shinkansen. The action sequences are too saturated with CGI to take advantage of such fully authorized verisimilitude (permission to use real bullet trains doesn’t make it any easier to stage a rescue attempt at almost half the speed of sound, much as I’d love for Tom Cruise to prove me wrong one day), but JR East’s endorsement lends a tactile credibility to the story’s quieter moments.
It also makes it that much easier to believe the “Taking of Pelham 123”-esque boardroom scenes where the corporate bigwigs race to engineer a clear path for the train as it blazes across the countryside. Government stooges might try to gum up the work, but the train company’s loyal employees will do everything in their power to ensure that “no operation comes before passenger safety!”
With that as the film’s prevailing ethos, there’s no chance for “The Bullet Train Explosion” to maintain any trace of the mean streak that ran through the 1975 original, or of the cutting satire that defines so much of Higuchi’s previous work. Even as the Shinkansen decouples some of its cars at full speed and performs death-defying track changes in order to avoid crashing into other trains, it never really feels like anything is meaningfully at risk, and Higuchi’s setpieces are seldom intense enough to offset the lack of danger that’s baked into this project from the start. That makes it even harder to swallow the villain’s evil plan (which is plenty outlandish to begin with), even if their endgame introduces a clever new challenge to Takaichi’s corporate stoicism.
Still, it’s low-key thrilling in its own right to watch the crew maintain their integrity even as the train they operate together begins to lose its own; to see them so loyally serve the common good even in the face of a bad guy who’s been conditioned to think that no one really cares about it in the first place. “The Bullet Train Explosion” might not offer anything close to the suspense of “Speed” (despite the fact that it moves significantly faster), but it does Takaichi proud by getting the job done, in spite of its faults.
Grade: C+
“The Bullet Train Explosion” will be available to stream on Netflix starting Wednesday, April 23.
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