

Rather, the team remained sure-footed and took little baby steps.
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The team’s first step into the NBA free agency market was not a huge stride.

Those needs may be huge, but the Minnesota Timberwolves roster moves began at a snail’s pace. In the process, the team has aimed at filling their biggest needs. Rather than fill roster vacancies with some of the biggest names of the league right out of the gates, the Timberwolves began about their business to the beat of their own drum. In fact, the team began their offseason with a bit of a slow and deliberate approach to the entire team roster-building process. Two and a half stars out of four.The Minnesota Timberwolves were never going to land any featured NBA stories at the pace the front office set when the NBA Free Agency market opened for business. "Bullet Train,” a Columbia Pictures release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for strong and bloody violence, pervasive language, and brief sexuality. “Bullet Train” might go off the rails but Pitt remains bulletproof. When, in the finale, Ladybug sails comically unharmed through the wreckage, it captures the situation exactly. His charm alone does wonders for the movie, raising it at least to the level of watchable.
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But the more-is-more manic energy of “Bullet Train" eventually peters out, since that's all the movie was ever running on. Leitch's film is colorful, cartoonish and well-choreographed.


In “Bullet Train,” a movie that proudly opts for style over substance, characters are introduced like videogame fighters, running gags get run into the ground and a winking irreverence lands somewhere in between playful and exhausting. The copious flashbacks and quirky banter (Henry's character has an outlook based around Thomas the Tank Engine) that accompany the juggling of all these characters in between bloody encounters is a familiar kind of framework recalling a long line of Quentin Tarantino knockoffs. There's a cameo that answers Pitt's in “The Lost City.” Another “Lost City” star, Sandra Bullock, is mostly only heard on the other end of a phone line, as Ladybug's handler. The actor playing this most fearsome character is best left to the third-act reveal, but that's just one way “Bullet Train” plays around with star persona.
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Bad Bunny) a dangerous young woman called Prince who fake cries her way out of nearly everything (Joey King) and Zazie Beetz's killer known as the Hornet.ĪCT drivers awarded for years of perfect safetyĪll are on the train for various criminal reasons ultimately connected to a Russian kingpin named the White Death. Director David Leitch, the stuntman-turned-director of “Atomic Blonde” and “Deadpool 2,” has brought the style and energy of a “John Wick” film (he co-directed the first) to a setting that has traditionally been associated with more subtle methods of killing.īut with films like Bong Joon Ho's “Snowpiercer” and the Liam Neeson-led “The Commuter" greasing the wheels, train movies have chugged along since the original “Murder on the Orient Express.” Adapted from Kōtarō Isaka’s pulpy novel, “MariaBeetle," “Bullet Train” amps the carnage further and shifts the action to Japan.īut the location here is mostly just a neon-lit stage for a high-speed melee with an international ensemble, including Brian Tyree Henry (best of the bunch) and Aaron Taylor-Johnson as bickering British “twins" Andrew Koji as a Japanese assassin a Mexican cartel veteran named the Wolf (Benito A. Ladybug, tasked to grab a very particular briefcase off a train headed from Tokyo to Kyoto, might not be up for the job, but the bigger question is whether “Bullet Train" is a good enough vehicle for its biggest star.
