On paper, it looks good: a handful of professional killers and psychopaths end up on the same high-speed train from Tokyo to Kyoto.

It's no coincidence, it turns out.

Their respective missions make them each other's targets.

Will anyone survive the journey and if so – what awaits them in Kyoto?

The film is based on

a popular Japanese detective story by Kōtarō Isaka from 2010, which in the hands of director David Leitch (Deadpool 2, Atomic Blonde) becomes westernized dumb-action that wants to make ultra-violence cool again.

"Bullet Train" therefore has all the twenty-year-old Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie markers, just to be ticked off: cockney English - tick, comic book gross-out entertainment violence - tick, fighters with ridiculous aliases like "Tangerine" enter and/or fight in slow motion to ironic music such as the Bee Gees and Engelbert Humperdinck – tick.

In order to really

maximize the references (or imitation?), they also let the stupid professional killer "Lemon" (Brian Tyree Henry) deeply analyze something banal, in this case the cartoon children's series Thomas and friends.

Just like when Tarantino analyzes Top Gun and Quarter Pounders in his films.

You throw in a poisonous snake on board the train too, because why not run a wink to the turkey movie Snakes on a plane from 2006 while you're at it.

Jokes about high-tech Japanese toilets and professional killers in therapy ensure that the humor in the film is of the dated kind.

"Bullet Train" tries

with every trick to be cool.

It's not cool.

However, it is Brad Pitt.

The proof that he's one of the absolute biggest and best movie stars of our time is that he's in a movie of this lousy caliber and still manages to be cool.

It's no art to be that in a lavish blockbuster with fantastic scenography, a tight script and a super director like David Fincher or Steven Soderbergh.

But being cool

in a tiresome and uninteresting action film where both cascading vomits of blood and talk about bowel function occur more than once requires something completely extra.

Why Pitt agreed to participate only he knows.

Sure, an action movie doesn't have to be more than pulse-pounding, funny-hatted characters and exploding heads.

But then it at least needs to have some heart or brain.

Two things that seem to have been left on the platform here.