20 Recent Movie Twists That Fell Completely Flat

A poorly-executed plot twist can completely derail a movie beyond repair, and Bullet Train Explosion is a great example of this. 

This Japanese Netflix Original is a decades-later sequel to a 1975 action thriller called The Bullet Train, in which a bomb is planted on a bullet train. If the train goes below a certain speed, it will explode (the Keanu Reeves classic Speed was inspired by it). This sequel has an almost identical premise and for a while, it's really good fun. And then it gets intolerably ridiculous. 

The bomber is actually a high-school student on the train named Yuzuki Onodera (Hana Toyoshima)... so, a teenage girl set up this complicated terrorist attack? This was already impossible to buy, and what made it worse was the way her motivations made zero sense. 

Her abusive father was one of the police officers who apprehended the bomber the original movie and she wants to tarnish his reputation and also that of the Shinkansen (Bullet Train) industry. But why? Once she reveals herself, she kills her father with a remote explosive and the industry she's attacking had nothing to do with her father's cruelty, so what was the point of attacking the train? 

In the end, Yuzuki was an inexplicably young, overpowered villain on one of the silliest, most pointless revenge missions in recent memory. The film is still watchable, but it would've been so much better without this awful twist.