ASSASSIN'S SPEED

BULLET TRAIN Action man David Leitch has Brad Pitt's hitman board a fast-moving train for a journey of non-stop carnage...

- JAMIE GRAHAM

It was only a matter of time until David Leitch directed Brad Pitt in an action movie. The pair met when Leitch was Pitt's stunt double on Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and their friendship deepened over four more actor/stunt performer team-ups. Then Leitch moved into directing with John Wick and Atomic Blonde, and Pitt, mightily impressed, signed up for a hilarious one-second cameo as The Vanisher in the Leitch-helmed Deadpool 2.

"We have a great relationship and we fell back into some great banter," Leitch tells Teasers, confirming there was only ever one choice to play Bullet Train's antihero Ladybug, an assassin we follow onto the titular Japanese Shinkansen and into a screeching succession of fast-paced (300km an hour!) set-pieces. "Brad is the epitome of cool and he's so good with character. When he came to the project, he had a lot of ideas about how he wanted to play Ladybug, and those things got baked into the DNA of the movie.

A glance at the film's trailer suggests that Pitt's ideas pertained to lending his deadly assassin a kooky streak, rather like Burn After Reading's Chad Feldheimer has quit the gym for the business of killing. As Ladybug goes after a mysterious briefcase that not one, not two, not three, but four other assassins are also determined to get their highly trained mitts on, you can expect gunplay with guffaws, punches with punchlines.