June 1, 2023
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By Tom Wilmot.
There’s a bomb on the Hikari 109! Tetsuo Okita (Ken Takakura) and his band of jaded blue-collar bombers try and extort cash from the federal government, holding the lives of some 1,500 bullet practice passengers to ransom. When the Nationwide Railway suggests stopping the practice to verify for an explosive, they be taught that the bomb will detonate if the car slows to lower than 80 km/h. As Okita negotiates with the powers that be, rail controller Kuramochi (Ken Utsui) and engineer Aoki (Sonny Chiba) hold the practice and its passengers hurtling in the direction of an unnervingly unsure destiny.
No, this isn’t the 2022 Brad Pitt car with an analogous sounding title. If the surface-level narrative for The Bullet Prepare sounds acquainted, it’s as a result of it bears an in depth resemblance (which screenwriter Graham Yost insists was inadvertent) to the 1994 Keanu Reeves car Velocity. For a supposed suspense thriller, a runtime of two and half hours raises eyebrows, but director Junya Sato manages to maintain stress by a number of intense set-pieces. A close to miss between passing trains, a ransom drop-off gone awry, and the eventual dealing with of the bomb itself all lead to nail-biting sequences. Among the extra spectacular scenes are delivered to life by the shrewd use of miniatures; these particular results are noticeable however maintain up surprisingly nicely because of Sato’s intelligent framing and digital camera placement. Few trendy Hollywood blockbusters are crammed with such quite a lot of suspenseful sequences, so the movie stays an enticing thriller proper up till its closing moments.
One in all The Bullet Prepare’s most interesting qualities is its all-star solid. Toei loaded the movie with as lots of its contracted stars as doable, a few of whom solely seem in blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameos – Sister Road Fighter’s (1974) Etsuko Shihomi is one such determine, popping up as a phone operator early on. Of the movie’s three main actors, Sonny Chiba is more likely to be probably the most recognisable to Western audiences, but he options in an unusually passive position right here. The ass-kicking exhausting nut of The Road Fighter trilogy, launched a 12 months earlier than The Bullet Prepare, is nowhere to be discovered, as Chiba stars as a profusely sweating practice engineer, Aoki, who’s left powerless on the controls of the seemingly unstoppable practice. Starring as Chiba’s superior, and serving because the movie’s ethical centre, is Ken Utsui as Kuramochi. Completely suited to the position of affable and dutiful rail controller, Utsui finds himself at odds together with his higher-ups and is positioned in surprisingly intense ethical dilemmas, the pressure of which finally take their toll.
The actual star of The Bullet Prepare, who by no means units foot in a railway station for everything of the runtime, is Ken Takakura’s Okita. A far cry from the maniacal mad bomber that one would possibly count on from such a movie, Okita is a mean Joe affected by the sudden finish to Japan’s post-war financial miracle. The character fits Takakura, greatest identified previous to this for his appearances in Toei’s early yakuza movies, the place he often featured as an honour-bound gangster. Okita and his gang of would-be bombers aren’t moustache-twirling villains with a political agenda. As a substitute they’re working stiffs making an attempt to get one again on the system that’s failed them. After all, these working-class anti-heroes are nonetheless prepared to danger the lives of 1,500 commuters to get what they need, a undeniable fact that the movie by no means shies away from or tries to defend, however they’re offered in a approach that makes them comprehensible. A part of the rationale for the lengthy working time is that the narrative takes pains to discover the backstory of our bombers, every of whom is sympathetic to an extent. You’ll inevitably end up rooting for Okita to make an unlikely getaway because the movie reaches the final of a number of climaxes.
Included in Eureka Leisure’s new launch of The Bullet Prepare is an English dubbed model of the profitable worldwide ‘Export’ reduce, which shaves the runtime all the way down to 115 minutes. For those who’ve ever watched the movie on UK streaming companies, that is the model you should have seen. Whereas the Export reduce is definitely brisker in tempo, including considerably to the narrative’s urgency, this comes on the expense of the backstories for our bombing crew. As such, you may’t assist however really feel {that a} important dimension to the story and its characters is misplaced within the ‘Export’ reduce, as there’s just about no purpose to sympathise with Okita and his conspirators.
Eureka’s package deal includes a host of informative dietary supplements, starting with a feature-length commentary from Midnight Eye co-founders Tom Mes and Jasper Sharp. The pair have developed a behavior of co-commentating lately, and their traditional spritely forwards and backwards is welcome right here as soon as once more. Amongst different issues, the Japanese cinema specialists focus on the profession of Ken Takakura, radical leftist protests within the Nineteen Sixties, and the rise of the influential Kadokawa Footage, all while name-dropping quite a lot of associated movies which can be certain to pique the curiosity of cinephiles.
Maybe probably the most enlightening complement on Eureka’s launch is a brand new interview with Junya Sato biographers Tasuya Masuto and Masaaki Nomura. The pair hint Sato’s profession at Toei and contact on a number of the key themes of his work, notably the plight of the person versus the system. In addition to dropping titbits in regards to the movie’s improvement and tight manufacturing schedule, which finally resulted in a muddled advertising marketing campaign, the biographers share the story of an undercover European actor who slyly took photos of a bullet practice management room for Toei after the Japan Rail refused to cooperate on manufacturing – one thing in regards to the title “Shinkansen Large Explosion” didn’t sit proper with the organisation. Complementing this function is an archival interview with Junya Sato himself, throughout which the director discusses working with Toei and feedback on the then-current state of Japanese cinema.
Movie students Tony Rayns and Kim Newman supply their two cents on The Bullet Prepare, the previous offering some background on Toei as a male-centric studio. Style movie professional Newman guides us by an pleasant historical past of mad bombers in cinema, taking us from Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1936) to Richard Lester’s Juggernaut (1974). Rounding out Eureka’s spectacular slate of extras is a booklet that includes a brand new essay from creator Barry Forshaw, who gives an summary of each Takakura’s and Chiba’s careers throughout the Seventies, together with exploring the style specialities of the main Japanese studios – Toei and Nikkatsu fought it out over yakuza flicks, whereas Shochiku was famed for its melodramas.
As shoppers, we’ve been spoiled lately with the sheer quantity of wonderful underground, traditional, and arthouse Japanese cinema that has been made accessible on UK dwelling media. Nonetheless, occasionally, a superb, old style, all-star blockbuster is required, and The Bullet Prepare suits the invoice completely. Eureka have pulled out all of the stops alongside the proverbial bullet practice line to do justice to this largely forgotten blockbuster. We are able to solely hope that extra Japanese epics obtain comparable remedy on their approach to the small display.
The Bullet Prepare is launched within the UK by Eureka.
