Agatha Christie, still one of the world’s bestselling authors, hasn’t always been well treated on screen. Many filmmakers have chosen to play her for laughs. The British films from the ‘60s, starring redoubtable Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple, remain the zenith for having fun with Christie’s eccentric sleuths. The dishwater dull ‘70s rendition of Murder on the Orient Express, with Albert Finney as Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, is the low water mark. Much better for deftly walking the thin line between drama and comedy was the popular ‘90s British television series, “Poirot,” with David Suchet in the title role.
Now, Kenneth Branagh takes a crack at Poirot, directing and playing the Belgian in another Murder on the Orient Express. With eyes that twinkle with delight and flash with sadness and sporting a mustache resembling a beaver pelt, Branagh carries the persnickety character with easy charm and fierce determination. A dandy and a perfectionist in a sloppy, imperfect world, Poirot has an eye for discrepancies, a suspicion of coincidences, an ear for significant slips and a mind in search of underlying patterns.
Branagh and his enormous mustache overshadow an all-star cast whose talents are never seriously challenged. We see Penelope Cruz as a glum missionary, Michelle Pfeiffer as a boozy American, Judi Dench as an imperious aristocrat, Willem Dafoe as an arrogant German professor (or is he?), Daisy Riddley as a governess involved in a secret affair with Leslie Odom Jr. and Johnny Depp as gangster and well-deserved murder victim. The baggy screenplay is a problem, the work of Michael Green, the writer behind the flaccid Blade Runner 2049. Granted, in Christie’s novel, Poirot is the best-developed character. The others are written as little more than animated murder motives.
With a tangle of strangers pressed together in a confined space, a moving train is a superb setting for drama. And the Orient Express was an opulent confined space in Christie’s day, an ocean liner on tracks whose five-star level of food and service even Poirot could find no fault with. But after an avalanche covers the tracks, stranding the train, the screenplay loses steam. Momentum ebbs as Poirot pokes around, interrogating the passengers—all of who with reason to wish the gangster dead.
Branagh filmed Murder on the Orient Express in 65mm, the rich field of vision rubbing awkwardly against largely digitalized backdrops. The interior of the train looks great. Poirot’s mustache is memorable.
