Stylish and starry, but no real head of steam
Murder on the Orient Express
Kenneth Branagh Kenneth Branagh, Judi Dench, Johnny Depp, Tom Bateman, Michelle Pfeiffer, Olivia Colman, Josh Gad, Daisy Ridley, Leslie Odom Jr
Looking over the cast list for Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express feels a little like perusing the menu before a 15-course gastronomic blow-out. Besides Branagh, who, in addition to directing, plays the great detective Hercule Poirot himself, we have Judi Dench as the Princess Dragomiroff, imperious as gathering thunder, Daisy Ridley as the governess Mary Debenham, as clipped and pretty as a bonsai, Keira Knightley, and Johnny Depp as the spivvy art dealer Samuel Ratchett, looking like 15 weasels in a belted leather trench coat.
This is not to mention Michelle Pfeiffer, Penélope Cruz, Olivia Colman, Willem Dafoe, Derek Jacobi, Sergei Polunin, among other big names.
Yet, despite its credentials – and its impeccable styling – this Orient Express never gets up a head of steam. Its cast feel fenced in, somehow, like travellers used to the legroom of the premium coach consigned to cattle class. Since the plot has 12 suspects, that’s partly a matter of logistics. But even in their one-on-one moments, something’s not there – you never feel as if you’re getting full-beam Pfeiffer or maximum Dench. The exception is Branagh, who’s an exemplary Poirot – trenchant, eccentric and quick as a squirrel, not to mention so resplendently whiskered even his moustaches have moustaches.
Branagh’s is the fifth Englishlanguage adaptation of Christie’s book. And arguably, that makes its job five times harder: the killer’s identity is now reasonably common knowledge, and once a mystery’s been solved, there’s not a lot else you can do with it.
The film makes up for this, at least at first, with something new: a Jerusalem-set prologue devised by Michael Green, the screenwriter, in which Poirot is enlisted by the local chief of police to solve the theft of a religious antique in which a priest, a rabbi and an imam are implicated. As well as a tidy introduction to Poirot’s methods, the sequence serves as a vivid introduction to the period that nicely counterbalances the main story’s snowbound confines. Every frame is full of the heat of the sun, the scale of the buildings, the surge and sweat of the crowds.
There are a number of other small recalibrations. To add some blockbuster pizazz, the original impassable snowdrift has been beefed up into an avalanche that derails the train entirely, stranding it on a creaking viaduct, and if the aim was to freshen up a familiar story, it works to an extent. But the better, harder way to do it, would have been with an array of supporting performances that gripped and entertained whether you knew what was coming or not.
Branagh has mapped out his film as scrupulously as his screen alter ego does the investigation, and fights the tendency for starchy period stories to wilt into camp. But a shade more playfulness would have gone a long way. This Orient Express clatters handsomely along, but I left the cinema wishing it had the nerve to jump the rails.