Directed by: Kenneth Branagh
Starring: Kenneth Branagh, Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, Josh Gad
Rated PG-13, 114 minutes
Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express is one of the best mystery novels ever written, a riddle with no extraneous details, a work whose every word is exactly in the right place, and, most importantly, a mystery that refuses to give anything away until the very end. It’s a story focused solely on deduction and investigation, one that doesn’t romanticize detective work or portray it as action-heavy or thrilling, but still manages to make Hercule Poirot’s sitting in a chair and thinking a thoroughly compelling act.
Kenneth Branagh’s (“Henry V”) adaptation of Christie’s novel, of which he is both director and star, is the exact opposite. This is a superfluous and cheesy movie, one that requires little mental investment but doesn’t compensate with gut-level entertainment—at least, not successfully. “Murder on the Orient Express,” by crassly presuming to improve upon a perfect story, is every embarrassing Hollywood cliché rolled up into one overlong and unmemorable sitting.
Most egregious of the movie’s sins are its desperate attempts to add action to an otherwise stationary plot. The story of a murder committed in the middle of the night on a train stuck in a blizzard, and of the subsequent detective work undertaken to reveal the killer, Christie’s novel traps all its characters aboard the Orient Express and leaves them there to stew and gripe and go stir-crazy. The adaptation, written by Michael Green (“Logan”), spits in Dame Christie’s face, as if to say, “You call that a mystery? Bor-ing!” Naturally, he throws in a couple flashes to spice things up: a chase scene, albeit the most halfhearted one you’ll ever see in your life; a nonsensical use of guns; a bar fight that begins for no reason and ends just as quickly. Those who think fat old Hollywood producers sit around all day in back rooms smoking cigars and saying things like “It’s OK, but it would really pop with a gunshot or two” have a substantial piece of evidence here to validate their cynicism.
Then there’s the cast, full of familiar faces, full of talent, but devoid of purpose. Besides the stars listed above, the likes of Dame Judi Dench, Penélope Cruz, Willem Dafoe, Daisy Ridley, Leslie Odom Jr., Derek Jacobi, and Olivia Colman all show up to bear witness to this unfortunate bastardization. To be fair, nobody here is a bad performer, but no one, with the exception of Branagh, Pfeiffer (“mother!”), and Gad (“Frozen”), has a chance to do anything more than strike a pose. And even those three leave us wanting: Pfeiffer’s Caroline Hubbard is a maudlin caricature of hysteria, Gad’s MacQueen a dull weasel of a crook. Branagh manages to imbue Poirot with a wry sense of humor that conveys to some degree the spirit of the novel, but by the movie’s midpoint that personality has given way to a series of earnest soliloquies that foist insufferably self-important themes onto the movie’s simple premise.
Even the movie’s look is cheap and uninspired. It opens with a wide establishing view of Jerusalem possessed of all the compositional grandeur of a postcard, and ends on a similarly uninteresting shot of a train receding into the distance. Throughout the movie, cameras float up and down, giving bird’s-eye and worm’s-eye view of the movie’s action for no other reason, it would seem, than to show us how hard it is to get a good angle in the narrow hallway of a train car. To give credit where credit is due, the costumes are fascinating, although mostly because they make you wonder what temperature it must be on this train if everyone dresses in such varying numbers of layers.
Of course, it’s nothing new for a film adaptation to be worse than the book, and in most cases I don’t think a strict comparison is a particularly meaningful way to assess the movie. In this case, however, I feel obligated to point out that, regardless of what this adaptation has kept from the novel or cut out, there is nothing in this movie—no character development, no plot twist, no suspense—that isn’t better executed by Christie. And given that the book is so short, I don’t even know that the movie is quicker. It certainly doesn’t feel like it.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 11/17/17.