Bullet Train needs a post-credits scene to explain one final mystery

After a little over two hours of sudden surprises in David Leitch’s over-the-top action extravaganza fast train, there’s one final surprise: there’s no post-credits scene. That feels unusual in a movie so overtly about callbacks and yes-ands, about stacking gags on gags, about topping even the most ridiculous bit of action with just one more twist. Like Leitch’s previous projects, John Wick, Hobbs & Shaw, Atomic Blondeand dead pool 2, fast train is more than a little tongue-in-cheek about its excess. But thanks to the source material, Kotaro Isaka’s novel fast trainthe film is also quite obsessed with justifying every leap of logic, even as it creates more improbable coincidences along the way.

So the lack of a closing Stinger gag feels out of sync with the rest of the action, but it also feels like a missed opportunity for a film so obviously focused on explaining how each individual piece of the puzzle 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.

[Ed. note: Minor plot spoilers ahead, mostly for something that doesn’t happen in Bullet Train.]

Image: Sony Pictures Publicity

At the beginning of the film, smash-and-grab mercenary Ladybug (Brad Pitt) accidentally loses his ticket on the eponymous bullet train. When he gets on, a conductor (heroes‘ Masi Oka) confronts him and is outraged that he doesn’t have a ticket. The conductor tells him to get off at the next stop. Ladybug tries, but the circumstances (and his own much-discussed unlikely bad luck) bother him. When he sees the conductor again, he receives a more insistent warning to get off the train. Ladybug makes a desperate effort to avoid the conductor and the scene sets for an escalating duel between them.

But it never happens. Masi Oka magically disappears from the film and is no longer spoken about. By the way, the train doesn’t seem to have any drivers, and the employees mostly disappear too. Unlike other aspects of the film’s happily complicated scenario, this one is never explained. Aside from a concession salesman played by criminally underused martial artist Karen Fukuhara (katana from the 2016 suicide squadand Kimiko out The young), the train staff simply evaporates.

Given how thorough the rest of fast train is about explaining other aspects of the journey – how the character X found out from Y, what happened to the rest of the passengers on the journey and more – that the inexplicable disappearance and interrupted storyline feel like a real anomaly. This is a film that reserves one minute for a montage that traces the origin and journey of a single water bottle, for heaven’s sake. (Granted, it’s blatant product placement, but it’s a funny one. It’s illustrative nonetheless fast train‘s commitment to the part as far as keeping the connections between each and every element of the film clear.)

As fast train As the corpses pile up and more and more cars are filled with blood, broken glass and improvised weapons, it becomes increasingly unlikely that the train crew will never notice or intervene. It’s also getting weirder that all that expensive liquor and food – not to mention the £20 water bottle – is left unattended. It all feels like the setup for one final gag explaining how Masi Oka and the crew disappeared.

But this gag never comes. The film certainly isn’t short of ways to accidentally or intentionally kill her, and it’s not short of dramatic or comedic reasons to do so. There are also never a lack of coincidences that could have thrown them off the train or called them away. Perhaps in a future Blu-ray release, we’ll learn about a cutscene that will reveal Oka’s fate. Until then, don’t sit in the theater (or on your couch once it hits streaming) and wait for a definitive fix, as it’s not coming.