Brad Pitt is vastly miscast in this...
The trailer looks cool, but the thing that stood out the most to me is that Brad Pitt seems vastly miscast in this.
His comedy timing didn't really land as emphatic as it should have, and it was hard -- within the span of the trailer -- to get any feeling at all that I was supposed to be sympathetic to his character.
Worse yet is that he's being portrayed as this "ultimate badass with a change of heart", and it's just really hard to buy into; I still can't get out of my head how much he whined about doing fight scenes in movies during his string of rough and gruff films like Fight Club and Snatch. So seeing the guy in some cool choreographed fight sequences has me scoffing instead of suspending my disbelief.
All truth be told, even though I'm not much of a fan, I honestly think this role would have been perfectly suited for Ryan Reynolds. I think he actually CAN pull off the sympathetic villain role who has a change of heart, and has the physicality to match. I was constantly waiting for the zingers in the trailer, but it seemed everyone else had funnier lines to deliver than Pitt, and that's because he's never been an off-the-cuff, improvisational comedic actor.
I think Pitt definitely has more range than Tom Cruise in certain roles, but even in this role I think Cruise would have been better suited than Pitt, only because it seems very similar to Cruise's character from Knight and Day.
Pitt definitely does better playing arrogant douchebags, sociopaths, and psychopaths (hence why he fits the role of the arrogant, douchebag adventurer so well in that other Sandra Bullock movie).
But lovable, sympathetic villains who are top-notch badasses? Ehh, Reynolds does a much better job of it. Heck, I could even see this role being a perfect fit for someone like Jackie Chan if it were made back in the mid-1990s. Only, Chan probably would have made it where his character looked identical to the killer and their identities got mixed up and he ended up on the train with everyone trying to kill him.
In any case, maybe the trailer was just composed of a lot of spoilers and parts that didn't showoff a more charismatic or likable version of Pitt's character. But by the time it finished all I could think about was, "This would have been a perfect movie for Ryan Reynolds!"