‘Bullet Train Explosion’ goes delightfully off the rails

It might sound familiar to western viewers as the setup of Speed, the 1994 action movie starring Keanu Reeves, set aboard a Los Angeles bus. While often thought to be a remake of The Bullet Train, Speed’s resemblance is allegedly coincidental, but the idea of a transport vehicle held hostage, under threat of explosion should it slow down, dates back much further than Sato’s original (to at least the 1966 TV movie The Doomsday Flight). Pre-Sept. 11 cinema was rife with such action fantasies, back when the motives of hijackers in the global zeitgeist involved ransom of some sort. It’s a much tougher sell today, but Bullet Train Explosion walks a fine line as a remake, one that both pays homage to its source material, while building upon it in strange but intriguing ways.

Unlike the 1975 movie, it was made with the help of the East Japan Railway Company (JR East), and—intentionally or otherwise—plays practically like a propaganda film for the public corporation. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, given both the level of realism and technical detail the film achieves, courtesy of JR East trains and equipment, and the way it dramatizes its train staff’s commitment to keeping passengers safe. Where the original frequently pulls back the curtain on its disgruntled terrorists, Bullet Train Explosion keeps them anonymous for much of the runtime, and sets its story largely aboard the train and within a JR East control room, oscillating rhythmically between both spaces as diligent characters on either side try to outwit a harrowing conundrum.

Our ostensible protagonist is veteran conductor Takaichi Kazuya (Kusanagi Tsuyoshi), who leads a school group on a guided tour of his high-speed Hayabusa 60 train before it departs for Tokyo. Through his interactions with the students, and with his fellow train staff—novice ticket-taker Hosoda Kanata (Fujii Keiji) and enthusiastic driver Non (Matsumoto Chika)—we learn of Kazuya’s kindly demeanor and his unwavering belief in getting passengers from point A to B safely and on time. It’s a ludicrous ethical backbone for a character to have, but Takaichi sells it with his sincerity. Besides, it’s the perfect outlook necessary for a cartoonish action movie in which the passengers’ lives are all at risk.

After demonstrating an explosion on a rural cargo train, an anonymous, voice-disguised terrorist calls the company to inform them of the explosives on Kazuya’s train—set to detonate should it drop below 100 km/h, or 60 mph—and to lay out their demands: 100 billion yen (more than $700 million) in funds collected from the Japanese public. Among the 300 or so passengers on board are wealthy influencer Kaname Jun (Todoroki Mitsuru), who tries to crowdfund the money, disgraced politician Ono Machiko (Kagami Yuko), who sees the conundrum as a way to launder her image, and a suspiciously calm gentleman (Satoru Matsuo) with a troubled and mysterious past. Each of these characters either willingly enters the spotlight, or is forced into it by their fellow passengers, as everyone tries to search for a solution—or for someone to blame.

In the JR East control center, a number of dedicated employees preside over switchboards, blinking map displays and even miniature train models to try and calculate their way out of this situation, demonstrating impossible maneuvers on an office table before trying to execute them for real. These two main groups, the control room and the passengers, remain in contact as they come up with numerous hare-brained plans involving last-minute track-switching and other death-defying ideas to keep the train barreling forward for as long as possible. All the while, their hands are shackled by red tape courtesy of a representative of the prime minister, who seems more concerned with the government’s image than with saving lives (an idea Higuchi deftly satirized in Shin Godzilla, his post-Fukushima send-up).

However, by framing the movie’s railways staff as innately altruistic—compared to the the stonewalling government suits—the movie maintains a sense of against-all-odds goodness befitting of a Superman comic, making it all the more riveting when the characters are forced to overcome some very literal trolley problems. Things become even more complicated when it turns out the mastermind’s motives may be a tad more personal than their terroristic demands make it seem, which results in Kazuya and the JR East staff having to reckon with possible failure, as the realistic weight and texture of the train gives way to equally realistic sparks and debris.

What’s more, the film uses its status as a remake to disguise some very surprising connections to the original, which start out as vague allusions before growing more concrete. It wouldn’t be too much of a spoiler to say it’s actually more of a legacy sequel (the events of the original are referenced in-world early on), though the exact dots it chooses to connect seem baffling at first. When the villain and their endgoals are finally revealed, the film takes on a surprisingly personal and hilariously nihilistic bent, orienting us firmly within the modern era of cinematic (and real world) terrorism, wherein the objective goes well beyond dollars and cents.

These operatic zigzags evolve in fascinating ways, down to the JR East employees perusing the villain’s Facebook posts for character-centric clues, before the whole thing starts to feel like an elaborate Saw movie. And yet, despite the messed-up motives at play, Bullet Train Explosion maintains its initial sense of decency, even when it seems like Kazuya might be forced to turn his back on his boy scout ideals, in scenes that make wonderfully stage-like use of the light streaming through the train’s windows. In the end, it’s a bombastic, over-the-top work of action expressionism with a gooey, cheesy, utterly human core, as even the most seemingly irredeemable characters claw their way towards redemption. Like the charging locomotive at its center, it never slows down.