I'm reading 'The Bullet Train', by Kotaro Isaka, but I've already seen the movie of the same title (2022). I am not going to commit the sin of comparing both texts, since it is known that they are different narrative arts, with different languages. Literature, due to its length, allows us to delve into the characters' thoughts. It is an element in its favor; while cinema offers visuality, the gestures and movements of actors and objects. I love both peculiarities as a reader and movie buff.
Broadly speaking, the plot consists of the conjunction of several murderers (9 in total) inside the Shinkansen or bullet train during its journey from Tokyo to Morioka. Each one has defined missions and, to increase the suspense, some missions hinder or harm others, thereby intensifying the various conflicts from the first minutes or pages.
It would be a story of crimes and reckonings, in the classic sense of the noir genre, if the characters were not so funny. The "dumb" or "predictable" ones contrast all the time with the intelligent and refined ones. Very hilarious dialogues and scenes emerge from this contrast. The brothers Mandarina and Lemon argue all the time over nothing or simple things, in the midst of dramatic situations that would make the most even-keeled person break out in a cold sweat.
For her part, Prince, the shy and scared teenager, hides a mind so macabre that it could move Lucifer himself.
Some want money, others revenge, and Ladybug (Brad Pitt), all he wants is for him very bad luck to not continue to haunt him. In the midst of so much human need there are rivers and rivers of black humor.
I surprised myself laughing on several occasions, while I said to myself: But what are you laughing at, if those people are suffering? The truth is that both Isaka, in his novel, and Zak Olkewicz (screenplay), had the ability to focus on their comic side many situations that would otherwise shock the viewer. It is an enormous merit to make people laugh with terrifying facts.
The performances, for their part, are a delight. Pitt, through the events, decisions and accidents that haunt his character, makes faces of surprise or fright, and achieves changes in voice and gestures of paranoia that at times I, half laughing and half tormented, thought: "Please don't let anything else happen to him." The duo of Mandarina and Lemon also injects no small amount of terror and comedy into the story. Well, nothing, friends, these strange murderers made me laugh and get irritated at the same time. Both the novel and the film have well-deserved their good reputation.
The frames are captures from my phone.