Bullet Train (2022)

It is supposed to be a bit of Tarantino-esque fun, this adaptation of Kōtarō Isaka's book about five assassins aboard the same fast train in Japan, but there's something sad about it: not even Tarantino does Tarantino very well, lately; Brad Pitt in the lead role certainly doesn't manage a young and edgy "Tyler Durden" anymore; and by casting him and other non-Japanese actors in an American adaptation of the Japanese story set in Japan, the action movie inadvertently becomes a message film, with the message - the destructive influence of foreigners upon Japanese society - front and centre, an inescapable part of every crescendoing action scene, yet completely ignored.

★★☆☆☆

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Terror Train (1980)

Three years after a (really revolting) med student prank, a group of students gather for a New Year's Eve party aboard a steam train, and as the train shoots through the night, it turns out one of those on board is picking the others off one by bloody one....and the passenger we sympathise with, not so involved in that prank and striving to stay alive while all her besties end up sliced and diced is -- no, not a starey young David Copperfield who appears as a magician without a Working With Children check, hired to be the onboard entertainment - but Jamie Lee Curtis, adding her 80s-horror clout to this effective slasher with several truly chilling moments.

★★★☆☆

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Narrow Margin (1990)

The RKO screenplay, first filmed in 1955 and then this time in 1990, has all the ingredients of a classic thriller: a train carrying a witness to murder and thugs trying to identify her before she and her escort, a Deputy District Attorney played by Gene Hackman, get to Vancouver to testify against a Mr Big - but it all ends up silly, empty stuff with the action amounting to Hackman flinging himself sideways into a sleeping car or into a nook or into a quiet cargo hold as the inept baddies trawl up and down and up and down the train corridors ridiculously unable to pinpoint the car in which Anne Archer, the witness, sits either being breathless and scared in the dark or else engaged in long conversations with the DA somehow still able to stop by regularly for lengthy heart-to-hearts.

★★★☆☆

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Number Seventeen (1932)

Based on a thriller play by Joseph Jefferson Farjeon, Alfred Hitchcock's 1932 movie starts engagingly enough as sinister characters descend upon a property, number 17, discover a body and try to work out why everyone has come to this ramshackle old property at night, but then things falter and the characters stumble around with not enough to do, clearly just biding time for the grand cinematic showpiece that comes towards film's end - an audacious runaway train scene that even today has your heart stop as the train rockets towards the end of the track! 

★★★★☆

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(The) Man On The Train (L'homme du train) (2002)

In this terrific, slow-burn French crime thriller, cool but full of heart, two men, one a slippered, pipe-smoking retired literature teacher and the other a leather-jacketed former stunt double, meet by chance in the week both men face a potentially life-changing Saturday - the teacher is scheduled to have triple bypass surgery, the Fonzi is robbing a bank - and both men are of an age that they are starting to contemplate the life paths they didn't follow, that the other did.

★★★★☆

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Terror By Night (1946)

This time, in number thirteen of the fourteen movies in the series, Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes boards a train to Scotland that is transporting the Star of Rhodesia, a jewel of great value, and although he succeeds in thwarting would-be thieves, a body turns up in one of the carriages.

★★★☆☆

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Miss Marple: 4.50 To Paddington (1987)

I like these BBC adaptations of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple mysteries, including this particular one based on What Mrs McGillicuddy Saw, because I like the opening credit titlecards and the jaunty Antiques Roadshow music that kicks in every time a body or scandal or an excuse to have a cup of tea turns up, and I especially like the 80-something Joan Hickson's Miss Marple, THE Miss Marple in my mind, who here enlists a young friend Lucy Eyelesbarrow to infiltrate the Crackenthorpe Manor to investigate a claim that a woman was strangled on a nearby train.

★★★☆☆

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Night Train To Lisbon (2013)

Seeing an out from his existence as a live-alone, play-chess-alone Classics professor, a Swiss man uses the train tickets he finds in the coat of a woman he saved from killing herself to go to Lisbon where he infects even a Boys Own Adventure set in pre-Carnation Revolution Lisbon with his tediousness.

★★☆☆☆

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The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)

The adventures of Katniss Everdeen continue in this, for readers of the book, perfectly watchable but for all others, slightly mystifying sequel that sees the heroine propelled to celebrity status, on tour by high-speed train across 'the districts', involved in backstage image management and audience manipulation, becoming the reluctant figurehead of a rebel movement, then thrown into the death arena that now features mandrills, oh, and poison mist, oh, and lightning, oh, and tidal waves, oh, and mockingbirds, oh, and wait, it's a clock...?

★★☆☆☆

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The Commuter (2018)

A daily commute on a surburban train is rendered even more mindless for an insurance salesman (and ex-cop) when a woman approaches him mid-journey with a harebrained proposal - enjoying the ensuing ridiculously plotted action aboard the train requires you to leave your mind at the departing station. 

★★☆☆☆

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Train To Busan (부산행) (Busanhaeng) (2016)

This Korean horror starts inventively but as though infected with its own zombie virus grows steadily more rudimentary and sluggish as it goes on, telling the story of a busy and important fund manager who is too wrapped up in his work to be able to meaningfully engage with his young daughter; their train trip to the child's mother's house on the child's birthday is interrupted by a zombie apocalypse (imagine a V/Line country service after an AFL match) leading to some genuinely heartbreaking scenes of the young girl crying amid zombie chaos, but at least the fund manager snaps out of his own zombie-like fugue and starts fighting for his and his daughter's survival.

★★★★☆

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Murder on the Orient Express (2017)

The Orient Express is snowed in but Kenneth Branagh's movie, so fussily presented it looks more like the Polar than the Orient Express, is a runaway train ripping through the details of Agatha Christie's book at breakneck speed so that there is no weight to any of it, and at this pace no number of sweeping camera shots back and forth over the enormous cast helps commit any of the individuals to memory - they are all far less important than Branagh's overthought, spectacularly odd moustaches - and in the end it is left to an overbearing soundtrack to insist, ridiculously, on the profundity of end scenes.

★☆☆☆☆

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Murder On The Orient Express (1974)

Given it is essentially a string of twelve or thirteen dialogues between Hercule Poirot and one suspect after another aboard the snowed-in Orient Express, scene of a ghastly murder, it is surprising how engaging Sidney Lumet's 1974 film version of Agatha Christie's book is, helped of course by its all-star cast and the fact the story is inspired by the real-life Lindbergh kidnapping, a crime that captivated and so outraged the world one suspects it would have even turned Agatha Christie's world famous eggheaded Belgian detective into a revenge-murder conspirator.

★★★★☆

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The Girl On The Train (2016)

A daily commute on a train allows a woman, not a girl, to observe the lives of two couples who seem to pop out and share intimate moments on their balconies with the regularity of cuckoo birds marking the time and the commuter gets mixed up in a murder case when one of the observed disappears, in this adaptation of the popular - but judging by this movie - ridiculously plotted Paula Hawkins book, a perfect movie for anyone who likes their mystery thrillers to unfold surprise-free, in an incoherent monotone, mostly in the dark and out of chronological order to disguise how unremarkable it is, with only personality-free characters, several of them indistinguishable from each other, behaving in only completely cracked ways.

★☆☆☆☆

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Under Siege 2 Dark Territory (1995)

A hostage situation in the Nakatomi Plaza was the first iteration of the Die Hard formula, since used in an airport (Die Hard 2), in a boys school (Toy Soldiers), aboard a boat (Under Siege), on a plane (Air Force One, Non-stop), in The White House (Olympus Has Fallen), in a neo-nazi clubhouse (Green Room) and here, in an Under Siege sequel about as cinematic as a MacGyver episode, the formula is applied to a transAmerican train and it is again up to Steven Seagal's unruffled former Navy Seal cook and his niece (a pre-comedy career Katherine Heigel) to sneak around and thwart the bad guys' diabolical nuclear plans.

★★☆☆☆

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Strangers On A Train (1951)

Based on Patricia Highsmith's first novel, this Hitchcock masterpiece is notable not just for its stand-out inventive scenes (the out-of-control merry-go-round, the murder reflected in a dropped pair of glasses, the staring face among tennis spectators) but also for its unnerving portrait of delusion - Robert Walker plays the oddball who embroils a tennis star into a warped murder scheme.

★★★★★

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Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987)

In this classic John Hughes comedy from the 80s, circumstances throw together an odd couple - a permed and incessantly jovial shower ring salesman (John Candy in a role that would be played these days by Melissa McCarthy) and an uptight and incessantly grumpy marketing executive (Steve Martin...(who, Ben Stiller? Sandra Bullock?)) - on a trip across America via planes, trains, and automobiles.

★★★★☆

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The Lady Vanishes (1979)

This 1979 Hammer Films remake of the 1938 Hitchcock classic is an unnecessary film greatly inferior to the original but it is camp fun with Cybill Shepherd cast perfectly as the badly behaved heroine who discovers a fellow trans-European train passenger, Miss Froy, has mysteriously disappeared - or perhaps she was never on board at all.

★★★☆☆

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The Lady Vanishes (1938)

A favourite film of mine, Hitchcock's  The Lady Vanishes is a rollicking comedy thriller in which a woman on a transEuropean train journey awakens to discover her elderly travelling companion, Miss Froy, has inexplicably disappeared.

★★★★★

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