Missing this one in theaters was definitely a grave mistake because watching this at home on my computer most certainly did not help my experience in the least.
SYNOPSIS: Unlucky assassin Ladybug is determined to do his job peacefully after one too many gigs gone off the rails. Fate, however, may have other plans, as Ladybug’s latest mission puts him on a collision course with lethal adversaries from around the globe—all with connected, yet conflicting, objectives—on the world’s fastest train.
Sounds cool right? Well, yeah, it is - sometimes. But, more often than not, this movie trips over its own shoelaces, and that’s mostly due to the fact that there is far too much going on all at once here. I would much rather see what the author of the original source material had in mind over the final product that we received because the final execution - in a lot of ways - is not great.
Brad Pitt as our main character “Ladybug” just doesn’t work for me. The constant tongue-in-cheek humor of his character reminded me a lot of Ryan Reynolds (If you’ve seen the film, interesting right?), and for Brad Pitt to be filling that role it just wasn’t the best fit. That’s not to say that Brad Pitt is bad in any sense, he seems committed enough to the action scenes and is having some semblance of fun, but I would’ve liked to see someone else take a crack at this.
As far as the rest of the cast goes, they’re all fine. I love Hiroyuki Sanada in literally anything he’s in, so it was a pleasant surprise to see him. Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Brien Tyree Henry have good enough chemistry to pull off a cute little duo, but like a lot of things in this movie, their relationship is poorly executed and under-utilized.
There are times in the film when certain plot points and information are withheld on purpose and then called back to later through a flashback that is not executed well whatsoever. I get the fact that there is a story outside of the bottleneck location of a singular train, but the way the flashbacks are integrated is very clunky.
The humor of the film also felt very forced at pretty much every single moment. Humor is subjective, and I’m positive people found this movie funny, but I think I could count on one hand the number of times I chuckled or laughed. This relentless beration of humor tonally messed with a lot of scenes where something dark or dramatic was occurring, but this alone doesn’t warrant the movie itself to be bad. You can have dark and funny moments coincide with one another, but if your direction is poor, the movie is going to fall flat: which it does.
I can’t say much about the action in the film because it really is more concerned with being funny than anything else, which is surprising considering David Leitch being involved with the John Wick films. I think the action is fine, and at times even exciting, but any tense moment is always interjected with an oddly timed song or joke.
I was consistently baffled by the number of bad decisions this movie continued to make throughout its runtime and found myself cringing at it more than having a good time. I will say, it did effectively hold my attention, and I think a lot of the shots in the film are beautiful. The production scale of this film is also impressive in the way that it feels so huge, yet was only shot in one location on two sound stages.
I wouldn’t say this type of movie isn’t for me, Deadpool 2 is directed by the same person and I enjoy that film. I just think here, there was too much going on all at once with character setup, plot revelations that felt weightless, and a lot of heavy-handed stylistic choices that just overall didn’t work for me. I would’ve loved to have seen this in a packed theater though, and I’m sure I would like it a lot more if I did.
5/10
Comments