Genre: Action
Premise: An assortment of assassins and criminals are all stuck on the same Japanese bullet train searching for a briefcase with 10 million dollars in it.
About: It’s the hottest project in Hollywood. John Wick’s David Leitch is directing this monster movie for Sony which will star Brad Pitt, Lady Gaga, Sandra Bullock, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Zazie Beetz, Logan Lerman, Joey King, Michael Shannon, and most importantly of all, the return of Masi Oka, who played “Hiro” on the show “Heroes.” Bullet Train is based on a novel by Kotaro Isaka and was adapted, somewhat surprisingly, by Zak Olkewicz, who doesn’t yet have a produced writing credit (although he has a lot of scripts in development and has been featured on the Black List).
Writer: Zak Olkewicz
Details: 121 pages (2/21/20 draft)
This project has been all over the news for months – a non-stop feed of high-profile casting announcements. Which made me curious as that usually means the script has a lot of great characters in it. Also, I like thrillers on trains. There’s something about being cooped up on a train with nowhere to go that intensifies a situation. It’s the same reason I like plane thrillers (by the way, I’m going to review that monster plane thriller that 12 studios bid on in the next two weeks).
So does the script live up to the hype? Get your metro passes ready, baby, and we’ll find out together.
Kimura is a Japanese man with a major drinking problem. In fact, he was passed out when his young son climbed up on a roof and fell off, sending him to the hospital, clinging to life. That’s the reality Kimura has to deal with now as he gets onto this morning’s Tokyo bullet train.
Meanwhile, we meet Tangerine and Lemon, two hitmen who may or may not be brothers (they claim they’re not). Tangerine is the brains of the operation, while Lemon can’t stop talking about Thomas the Tank Engine, that kid’s show about a train with a face. It is through the prism of Thomas that Tangerine understands the complex workings of the world around him.
Tangerine and Lemon, who love bantering by the way, are in possession of The Son, who is the son of a Russian crime boss and all around terror best known as The Black Death. Some men kidnapped The Son and Tangerine and Lemon showed up with their ten million dollar ransom, but instead of giving it to the kidnappers, they killed them, all 17 of them in fact (we get a quick flash-cut of all 17 kills). Now all they have to do is deliver the suitcase of 10 million dollars and the Son to the Black Death at the end of the line.
There’s a small problem, though. Lemon thought it would be a good idea to leave the suitcase in the storage area, which has allowed a private investigator named Ladybug (a man, in case you were wondering) to take the suitcase and scuttle off to some other part of the train. When Tangerine and Lemon realize what’s happened, they make it their primary focus to find the person who stole their suitcase. The reason this is their primary focus is because if this person gets off at any stop and disappears, the two of them will be dead.
Back to Kimura, who is moseying about the train when a teenage girl named Prince (yes, I know Prince implies she’s a boy) snags him and ties him up in one of the compartments. She explains to Kimura that he is going to help her kill The Black Death. And if he doesn’t, she has a nurse on call in the hospital where his son is at and that nurse is going to kill him.
If all of this isn’t crazy enough, a giant poisonous snake is slithering its way around the insides of the train because… well, because why not? I suppose you could say it’s a precursor to just how crazy things are about to get. Because once Tangerine and Lemon get back to their seat after their first run-though on the train, they find that The Son is DEAD. Uh oh. Now what are they going to do?
Before long, we realize that the person we really have to be worried about is Prince. Prince is a legitimate psycho. She not only kills Kimura, but as he lays dying, she explains, in detail, how she’s going to slowly kill his son. Sounds like she’d be great at parties. All of this is happening amidst the broader question of, who is The Black Death? And what is he going to do when he learns that neither his alive son or his 10 million dollars is waiting for him at the last stop?
Let me start off by saying this is the kind of movie I would like to produce. All it cares about is that its audience has a good time. Every character, every dialogue scene, every plot choice, is designed to entertain. However, that doesn’t guarantee it *will* entertain. Intentions are not results. You still have to deliver. So let’s look at this piece by piece to see if it delivered.
For starters, they use a good old fashioned McGuffin. Which is the briefcase. This is the *thing* that all the characters are after. I don’t think a lot of writers understand why a McGuffin is so useful. The main reason is that it makes every character in your story active. If everyone’s got the same goal – get the suitcase – then they will all be actively pursuing something.
The best thing about a well-constructed McGuffin is that it creates collisions. Characters will keep bumping into each other. And since the characters want the same thing and only one of them can have it, there is natural conflict in every interaction. That’s an underrated story device, in my opinion – the value of constant collision between characters. The more of that you have going on, the more drama you’re going to have in your screenplay.
But even if you do these things, it does not guarantee a successful result. That’s because the individual pieces themselves – the characters – must all be interesting. And I think that’s where you’re going to have differing opinions on Bullet Train. They’re going for this late 90s, almost Tarantino-like approach, to the characters – especially Tangerine and Lemon – and it’s hard, when reading their dialogue, not to think about how much better Tarantino is at this stuff. That’s not to say the dialogue is bad. But it has a little bit of a try-hard quality to it. The Thomas the Train stuff, in particular, was overcooked. It’s one thing to bring it up a couple of times. But it’s literally all Tangerine talks about.
Luckily, those two are balanced out by Prince, who’s an excellent character. In fact, I think Joey King is going to steal this movie. She’s a legit psychopath, essentially playing the worst version of a Generation Z teenager. If you’ve ever thought you’ve run into the most entitled person you’ve ever met, wait until you meet Prince.
Another thing I liked about Bullet Train is that it made some splashy unexpected choices, which I think you have to in a movie like this. If you play a movie called Bullet Train, where a bunch of assassins are stuck in a train together, too straight? You’re missing out on some fun. So I liked the fact that there’s this random snake on the loose. I liked that The Son dies on page 30. I like anything that makes the audience think, “Uhhhhh, now what?”
I do have some advice for those writing scripts like this. You have to rewrite these scripts incessantly. Because they are highly dependent on how clever they are. And the best way to be clever is through setups and payoffs. But, as seasoned writers know, setups and payoffs are always clunky in the first few drafts. You have to keep smoothing them out over time to the point where you don’t even notice the setup.
And I don’t think Bullet Train quite got there. Then again, this is a 2/21/20 draft. I don’t think they started shooting until this year? So they’ve had some time to clean those up. What they’ve got here is good. But when you’re jumping around this much and there’s so much to keep track of, you have to rewrite tirelessly to get all the setups and payoffs exactly right.
Final thoughts. This was good. It’s going to be a fun movie. In fact, I’d say it’s the exact type of movie we need right now. Good old fashioned movie magic fun.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Design a script with a bunch of fun characters who get to do a lot of fun things. You do that and you get actors wanting to play parts. This isn’t as important in studio movies where money gets you any actors you want. But when you’re an aspiring writer trying to make a name for yourself, a script with a bunch of actor-friendly parts is a great way to get noticed, and, more importantly, get your movie made.
