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It typically takes somewhere between two and three hours to get from Tokyo to Kyoto by bullet train. But for the ensemble traveling to and from the cities in David Leitch’s (2014’s John Wick, 2017’s Atomic Blonde) new action thriller named after that nifty mode of transportation, the journey is erroneously stretched overnight, and made extra inconvenient because everybody — or at least everybody on whom screenwriter Zak Olkewicz puts his attention aboard this unusually vacant locomotive — is an assassin interested for varying reasons in a silver briefcase tucked away in the luggage section secretly fat with $10 million. 

The assassins are played by Brad Pitt, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Brian Tyree Henry, Joey King, Zazie Beetz, Andrew Koji, Hiroyuki Sanada, and Puerto Rico’s musical superstar du jour Bad Bunny. Because why not end the starriness or puzzling dominance of Westerners in this adaptation of a Japanese novel by Kōtarō Isaka, there also are cameos from Channing Tatum, Sandra Bullock, Michael Shannon, and, in what practically amounts to a horror-movie jump scare, Ryan Reynolds. Almost every character is unwittingly fighting to see who can also be the most insufferable. Olkewicz, who conspicuously yearns to be a successor to Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie, writes everyone as quip machines whose off button broke. They’re differentiated with flashy Reservoir Dogs (1992)-esque code names (like Ladybug, Tangerine, Lemon, and so on) and even flashier outfits that seem meant to stand in for character depth, from King’s all-pink yassified Veruca Salt look — complete with a gun wrapped in a cherry-beaded hair-tie — to Pitt’s librarian-like black frames and casual bucket hat atop stringy Iggy Pop hair.

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