‘MURDER’ DERAILED
Branagh leads bumpy ride aboard the ‘Orient Express’
In
“Murder on the Orient Express,” 20th Century Fox's attempt to reboot the first in a series of worldwide hit adaptations of Agatha Christie mystery novels from the 1970s and '80s, director and leading man Kenneth Branagh appears to have a mustache that also has a mustache. The thing wraps around the actor's face like a hirsute “face-hugger” from “Alien” (well, Ridley Scott is one of the producers) and is so grotesque you'll expect it to leap off the actor's face and start running around.
The previous Christie films featured “all-star” casts of famous actors who had seen better days and young upand-comers. This new, more comical “Murder on the Orient Express,” scripted by Michael Green (“Blade Runner 2049”) with intrusive music by Patrick Doyle, is almost a complete fumble, starting with that Branagh face gear as Christie's immortal Belgian detective, fussbudget and connoisseur, Hercule Poirot.
The character was, of course, made iconic by the English actor David Suchet on PBS from 1989 to 2013. Poirot has also been played by Charles Laughton; Orson Welles; Albert Finny, in Sidney Lumet's 1974 “Murder on the Orient Express”; and Peter Ustinov.
This new “Murder on the Orient Express” begins incredulously at the holy Western Wall in Jerusalem in 1934, where detective Poirot is allowed to corral a priest, a rabbi and an imam in front of an angry crowd and explain that they are the suspects in the theft of a priceless relic and proceeds to solve the crime in front of his audience. It's ridiculous and so is the rest of the movie.
On board the Orient Express, a posh art deco-kitted luxury locomotive from Istanbul that is a grand hotel on wheels, slimy gangster Edward Ratchett (an unpleasant looking Johnny Depp) is stabbed to death multiple times in his cabin at night, and Poirot with the help of his friend the train's director, M. Bouc (Tom Bateman), is asked to find the murderer.
Among the suspects are innocent seeming governess Mary Debenham (Daisy Ridley), her hot-headed lover and perhaps accomplice Dr. Arbuthnot (Leslie Odom Jr.), gay divorcee Caroline Hubbard (Michelle Pfeiffer), a Russian princess( Judi Den ch) with tiny dogs and an assistant companion (Olivia Colman), a racist Teutonic professor (Willem Dafoe), Ratchett's bourbon-swilling sidekick McQueen (Josh Gad), a Spanish religious zealot (Penelope Cruz) and a Barbital-addicted countess (Lucy Boynton) and her lover (Marwan Kenzari), a famous dancer who has Bruce Lee moves that he uses on the paparazzi.
Among the clues are a red kimono and a missing train conductor. But the real mystery is how do you manage to waste a resource like Dench so completely? Branagh is fine, and he doesn't have to kiss up to the director for close-ups, even if he seems more Clouseau than Poirot half the time. Pfeiffer makes the strongest impression outside of Branagh. The film meanders through a snowy, mountainous, chiaroscuro wilderness of CGI that looks about as real as “The Polar Express.” The ending sets up the Poirot sequel “Death on the Nile.” Mon dieu, I don't think that is going to happen.