Spectacular from a visual perspective - its production design and CGI dazzle the viewer's eyes instantly - Kenneth Branagh's latest remake of Murder on the Orient Express is a movie that feels about 40 years or so late to the modern-murder mystery party. The cast is as vast and starry as the landscape and richly black skies of the mountainous nights through which the titular trains zooms during the cold European winter. After a rich businessman, Samuel Ratchett (Johnny Depp), is murdered during the night, the shadow of suspicion falls on every passenger who held a grudge against the deceased.
Agatha Christie, a well known mystery writer whose reputation depended on wowing her readers with many a whodunit in her heyday, has had better movies made based on her original works, and most notable of all is the Sidney Lumet 1974 adaptation of this very story, with Albert Finney in the lead role. The energy and elegance of what we see never once replicates in what we feel. This is most true of the protagonist, the genial French detective, Hercules Poirot. Branagh plays him as a man only too concerned with the upkeep of his peculiar mustaches, and hardly as a detective of flesh and blood whose quest we should relate to at all. But the movie is also incredibly humorless, a flaw that keeps it trudging like an overlong freight train instead of the magnificent locomotive it claims to be.
Murder on the Orient Express continues Hollywood's twenty-first century quest to remake classic cinema of the past to a whimpering effect. Seldom has a Branagh movie felt this unnecessary and redundant, and I doubt that even Poirot himself could figure out the purpose of its existence.
C-
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