August Movie Round-Up: Bullet Train, Emily the Criminal, Laal Singh Chaddha

Summer has delivered a plethora of varied movies as is its wont, so if you’re looking for some action, thrills, or Bollywood goodness, read on for some quick recommendations of what to check out at your local theater.

Bullet Train: Written by Zac Olkewicz and directed by David Leitch, based on a novel by Kotato Isaka, this movie delivers everything you would expect from the trailer. It’s a high-octane action comedy with a Japanese manga sensibility, and everything devolves into a lot of violence and gore. There are several rival killers who have descended upon this one bullet train traveling to Kyoto, and everyone is on different overlapping missions that mean that things get very complicated very fast. 

At the center of it is "Ladybug" (played by a wonderfully hapless Brad Pitt) who is returning to work after a hiatus and was promised this would be an easy job where all he has to do is retrieve a briefcase, nothing else. Welp, life is never that easy, and that briefcase leads to myriad complications where the man simply cannot seem to get off this train.

This is your typical summer popcorn movie. It’s loud and brash, it boasts a great cast, the story is compelling enough to keep things moving ahead, and you won’t get too bored. Will you remember anything after you’re done? No. But are there enough twists and turns and does it look quite pretty for the two hours that you’re strapped in for the ride? You bet.

Emily the Criminal: Written and directed by John Patton Ford and starring Aubrey Plaza (who also produced the film), this is a taut thriller about what it means to be poor in America and how easy it is to fall through the cracks. Emily is a young woman who amassed a mountain of student debt and then couldn’t even finish college because she had to take care off a sick relative. She loves art, but absolutely cannot earn a paycheck that way so has to struggle at a minimum-wage job with a catering company to try and make ends meet. She has a black mark on her record because she was arrested when she was younger, which means that she now fails every background check when she applies for corporate gigs so is stuck in this vortex of poverty that seems absolutely inescapable. Until a colleague gives her a mysterious number and tells her to text it if she wants to make $200 for an hour’s worth of lightly illegal activity. 

What follows is another vortex, but this one spirals into a world of criminality and credit card fraud where Emily can finally spy an opportunity to dig herself out of her current financial situation. Of course, it starts out simple and then turns into an absolute nightmare, and it is a thrill to watch how things play out over 93 minutes. 

Aubrey Plaza is wonderful in this role, filled with a quiet rage and desperation that erupts in epic ways over the course of the movie, while Theo Rossi is great as the Lebanese man who takes her under his wing and has his own immigrant hopes and dreams of this criminal enterprise. It’s a sad movie but a good one, and given the recent news about student debt relief, serves as a worthy reminder of the many ways America’s lack of a social safety net can drive ordinary people to make extraordinarily poor decisions that will haunt them for a lifetime. There's also some epic social commentary about how the lack of debt imbues people with so much privilege that they completely fail to recognize (unpaid internships anyone?). It's a clever, biting film, and well worth a watch the next time you want to rail against capitalism. Which, for me, is all the time.

Laal Singh Chaddha: We all know that I wouldn’t miss Aamir Khan’s latest movie right? This is a remake of Forrest Gump (this is the rare instance where Bollywood actually went through the proper channels and got the rights to a Hollywood movie) so what follows is a three-hour tour of recent Indian history and geography, with two great central performances from Aamir as Laal and Kareena Kapoor Khan, as his best friend (and then maybe something more?), Rupa.

Written by Atul Kulkarni and directed by Advait Chandan, this film takes everything that was memorable about the original and then imbues it with uniquely Indian elements that make it feel fresh and new. Like the original, it is essentially a series of vignettes strung together, but I appreciated the growth of the main characters, particularly the rather harrowing journey that Rupa goes on as a girl who comes from an abusive household and then continues that cycle as an adult woman in the way that so many women unfortunately do. 

I also greatly appreciated the fact that our hero was a Sikh man, as that’s a relative rarity in most Hindi movies. Sikhism plays a significant role in terms of various religious conflicts Laal is subject to as he grows up, but the most poignant moment of the film was when he decides to start wearing a turban again as an older man. There is a beautiful scene set to Ik Omkar where we just watch Laal lovingly and reverently tie his turban around his head and it was a powerful moment that made me tear up and appreciate how this movie took its time about everything. People often complain that Bollywood movies are too long, and this film certainly could have used some more judicious editing. But when I watched that one scene? I was perfectly happy to not change a thing.