a review of 午夜食人列车

𝖍𝖔𝖔𝖕𝖙𝖔𝖇𝖊𝖗 𝖝 𝖓𝖎𝖌𝖍𝖙 𝖙𝖊𝖓: Came away from this one enjoying the bits I recognized from Barker's short story and Kitamura's hyperkinetic direction (plus fight direction by David Leitch), but not quite understanding some of the adaptation choices. The addition of Leslie Bibb and Roger Bart's characters didn't do much to enhance the themes, since one of the points of the original story was that the main character (named "Leon Kaufman", oddly prefiguring the current controversy over the very non-Jewish Bradley Cooper playing Leonard Bernstein) was this lonely workaday drudge with no apparent friends/relationships in the big mean city. Cooper/Kaufman's eventual fate is revealed as an overwhelming *upgrade* from his previous life/career circumstances, and it's weird that the movie undercuts this concept at the outset by giving him a pretty decent NYC lifestyle with friends who all hang out at the same diner together like characters from a Must See TV-era sitcom. Although Bart goes through the movie like a dead man walking to the point that his eventual dispatching at the hands of Vinnie Jones' killer feels anticlimactic, Bibb's role in this film is especially thankless. Pretty much all she gets to do in this movie is being creepily objectified and manhandled by Cooper (whose character is written to be more ambiguously unsympathetic than the way BC is playing him) before semi-randomly making herself into a damsel in distress just in time for the third act. PS: About halfway through there's a shot of a carefully-circled subway schedule that clearly shows that the titular train is in fact the 2 AM Meat Train, which bothered me in a way that I can't fully articulate.