Bullet Train Explosion

Following his recent successes with Shin Godzilla and Shin Ultraman, director Shinji Higuchi takes on another franchise with Bullet Train Explosion (2025), a galvanizing legacy sequel to the 1975 Japanese film The Bullet Train. The premise is nearly identical to the original: terrorists plant a bomb on a bullet train that will explode if the train drops below a certain speed. Civic and company leaders collaborate to keep passengers and crew safe without negotiating with the terrorists. And while Higuchi is an adept enough filmmaker to deliver a high-stress and satisfyingly entertaining train movie, his latest loses sight of its own strengths and crashes before the titular train when it abandons its socio-political themes.

The Hayabusa 60 runs from Shin-Aomori to Tokyo and cannot drop below 120 km/h. From school children to an elderly electrician, the train mirrors Japanese society. Higuchi follows train-suspense genre forerunners like Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Snowpiercer (2013), Bullet Train (2022), and fixes together an ensemble cast. The three characters we get to know best are head conductor Kazuya Takaichi (Tsuyoshi Kusanagi), a disgraced politician (Machiko Ono), and a tediously annoying influencer (Jun Kaname), though even these three become caricatures symbolically reduced to their professions and an identifiable personality trait or two. The characters are emphatically not the draw of this ticking-clock thriller. 

The large ensemble produces only one truly likeable lead, the ethically sturdy and professional conductor Kazuya Takaichi. Opportunistic politician Yuko Kagami and her assistant (Daisuke Kuroda) take advantage of the hostage situation to advance their own political careers. Influencer Mitsuru Todoroki does the same by launching a crowdfunding website to raise the funds since the government refuses to negotiate with terrorists. These narcissistic public-facing individuals start a thematic thread about how we culturally deal with trauma that gets tossed aside without resolution.