Bullet Train really needs a post-credits scene
After a little over two hours of sudden surprises in David Leitch’s over-the-top action extravaganza Bullet Train, there’s one final surprise: There’s no post-credits scene. That feels unusual in a movie that’s so overtly about callbacks and yes-ands, about piling gags on top of gags, about one-upping even the most ludicrous action bit with just one more twist. Like Leitch’s previous projects, John Wick, Hobbs & Shaw, Atomic Blonde, and Deadpool 2, Bullet Train is more than a little tongue-in-cheek about its excess. But thanks to the source material, Kotaro Isaka’s novel Bullet Train, the film is also fairly obsessive about justifying each leap of logic, even if it sets up more improbable coincidences in the process.
So the lack of a final stinger gag feels out of sync with the rest of the action, but it also feels like a lost opportunity for a movie that’s so blatantly focused on explaining how every single puzzle piece fits together. There’s an odd plot hole in the middle of it all, and a post-credits scene would have been the perfect place to fill it in.
[Ed. note: Minor plot spoilers ahead, mostly for something that doesn’t happen in Bullet Train.]
Early in the film, smash-and-grab mercenary “Ladybug” (Brad Pitt) accidentally loses his ticket for the titular bullet train. When he boards, a conductor (Heroes’ Masi Oka) confronts him, and is incensed that he doesn’t have a ticket. The conductor orders him to disembark at the next stop. Ladybug tries to, but circumstances (and his own much-discussed improbable bad luck) interfere. When he sees the conductor again, he gets a more forceful warning to leave the train. Ladybug starts making frantic efforts to avoid the conductor, and the scene is set for an escalating
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