Murder on the Orient Express is, of course, an adaptation of the classic mystery novel by Agatha Christie. I haven’t read the book (though I have read some of Christie’s many other mystery novels), but I have seen the original 1974 film adaptation. Truth be told, while it is considered a classic, it was never one of my favorite of Christie’s stories. Most of her novels require some suspension of disbelief for the mystery to work, but the level of coincidence and oversight needed for this plot to work are a bit too much for me. That leaves me in a bit of a conundrum, as I’m trying to review a whodunit without revealing who did it or my issues with that revelation. Consequently, I’m going to focus mainly on the film’s merits as a remake and, while this isn’t a bad movie, it will feel inferior and unnecessary to anyone that has seen the 1974 version.
Kenneth Branagh directed the film and stars as Hercule Poirot, one of Christie’s two primary literary detectives (the other being Miss Marple). Poirot is considered one of the world’s greatest detectives and finds himself aboard the Orient Express en route to a vacation. The train is disabled and trapped by an avalanche while travelling through the mountains of the now-defunct nation of Yugoslavia, which is a mystery unto itself because there aren’t any mountains in Yugoslavia. To further complicate matters, and because Poirot stumbles upon murder mysteries with alarming frequency, one of the passengers was murdered the previous night. It is up to Poirot to deduce the identity of the killer before the train gets back on track.
The biggest problem here is that much of the background and clues needed to make sense of the mystery are underdeveloped or omitted entirely. Poirot isn’t so much a detective here as he is an incredibly lucky bastard that makes wild guesses based on little-to-no information and they miraculously turn out to be true. The plot hinges largely on secret identities, most importantly of the victim. The original film opens with a sequence that provides crucial background information for that later plot twist, while this film eliminates that and instead opens with an unnecessary sequence of Poirot solving a minor case to establish for the audience that he is a detective (simply introducing him as a detective would have sufficed). The film then splices that background information throughout the film, but the result is that the audience has little context for the twist when it occurs and the leap in logic that Poirot makes to deduce the twist is fucking ridiculous because so little information has been provided. Much of the film suffers from a similar issue, as the interrogation scenes have been truncated in this version and leave out critical clues that would be needed in order for someone to actually figure this out. These bizarre omissions make the resolution of the mystery seem cheap and Poirot’s ability to solve it seem absurd.
Despite the lack of such important material, this version pads its running time with a bunch of nonsense. As mentioned, the opening sequence adds nothing to the film except an extra 10 minutes or so. There are some added action sequences that are completely out of place and seem to exist only because the studio thought that modern audiences would be bored without a random action scene to break up the dialogue. There are also a bunch of odd scenes of Poirot sitting and looking depressed as he stares at a picture of his long-lost wife (girlfriend?). We don’t know what happened to her and it has absolutely nothing to do with the plot, but it happens three or four times. If the movie has time for such random and irrelevant things, one would think that it would have time to include things like the fucking clues.
On a performance and technical level, the film wildly swings from excellent to infuriating. The cast (including Branagh, Johnny Depp, Penelope Cruz, Michelle Pfeiffer, Judi Dench, William Dafoe, etc.) is excellent and lives up to the ensemble that was assembled for the original film (which included Sean Connery, Ingrid Bergman, Lauren Bacall, Anthony Perkins, etc.). The interior scenes of the train are well-shot and arranged, as Branagh is a solid director. But all of that is pissed away anytime I have to see exterior shots of a goddamn computer-generated train travelling through goddamn computer-generated locations. How fucking lazy has Hollywood become that they can’t just film an actual fucking train? The goddamn train is in the title of the fucking movie and you couldn’t just film an actual fucking train? And you couldn’t just film in the actual locations? Granted the majority of it takes places by a mountain that doesn’t actually exist, but you couldn’t find a fucking mountain somewhere? This was filmed in 70mm and I have no idea why, as such an expansive format is wasted on something that either takes place inside a cramped space or on a fucking Mac screen. I haven’t seen anything this lazy since that fucking CGI squirrel in The Huntsman: Winter’s War.
Despite my rants, this isn’t awful. But I do love old-fashioned murder mysteries and I had higher hopes for this. The film ends with the implication that this could be the first in a series of Poirot movies as he heads off to solve another mystery (this one from the novel Death on the Nile). I wouldn’t be opposed to that, as I do see potential here despite a lot of confounding choices. If you want to go to the movies over the holiday and super heroes aren’t your thing, then you might enjoy this. But I do recommend watching the original instead if you only need one version of this story in your life.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_on_the_Orient_Express_(2017_film)#/media/File:Murder_on_the_Orient_Express_teaser_poster.jpg
