Murder on the Orient Express

'Murder on the Orient Express' is one Agatha Christie's most famous titles and it contains perhaps the most famous whodunnit resolution in all of her work. Once you have seen/read it and remember the resolution any revisiting of the work can be rather tedious. The story has been filmed several times for both the big screen and television and the 1974 film version was extremely successful. Essentially the plot is that a passenger aboard the Orient Express is murdered during the night and an investigation of the fellow passengers is conducted to establish the murderer.

This 2017 version is Directed and Produced by Kenneth Branagh who also stars in it as the eccentric Belgian Private Detective Hercules Poirot. The film adds a new introduction to establish Poirot's eccentricity and brilliance and a new faux ending in which Poirot has a mental struggle on how he will explain his findings to the Police. Both seem unnecessary to me but this version is a relentless Branagh-athon and so it is that Branagh/Poirot dominates every scene.

I was hoping that Director Branagh might combat the familiarity of the plot by finding an inventive way to highlight interesting aspects of the luxury train service. For one brief moment I thought he might manage it. An early scene has the camera tracking down the length of the train from the vantage of the platform following as Branagh/Poirot is taken to his compartment. This provides glimpses of the passengers already on board and some of the train's facilities. A clever moment but it is not built on.

The long middle section of the film in which Poirot interviews the passengers is deadly dull. Each scene is yet another opportunity to demonstrate Poirot's (Branagh's?) brilliance but the passengers themselves remain steadfastly uninteresting and less than fully formed. Christie aficionados will be bemused to see that this Poirot is particularly athletic grappling energetically with various suspects and witnesses.

If you've never seen/read the story before or if you don't recall whodunnit you may well find this an entertaining experience, even possibly thrilling but I would doubt that.

There are some lovely images but even then the computerisation is obvious. An unnecessary remake.

✮✮