Murder on the Orient Express
- Aymen Saqib
- Dec 1, 2017
- 2 min read
Rating: 6/10
Directed by Kenneth Branagh
Starring
Kenneth Branagh as Hercule Poirot
Penelope Cruz as Pilar Estravados
Willem Dafoe as Gerhard Hardman
Judi Dench as Princess Dragomiroff
Johnny Depp as Ratchett
Josh Gad as Hector MacQueen
For her fans, Agatha Christie will never go out of fashion. But does that mean that Kenneth Branagh can tempt us all with the exact duplication of her novel, when it isn’t even its first installation? Certainly not! But can you stop Branagh? Certainly not! Murder on the Orient Express, the third attempt at Agatha’s whodunit, faithfully follows its source material making the 2 hour experience very inert and leaves us thinking; was this version really necessary to create?
The year is 1935 and the Orient Express is making its way from Istanbul to Calais. There are roughly a dozen passengers aboard the carriage. At night, one of the passengers, Ratchett, is killed, his body covered with several stab wounds. Luckily one of the other passengers is Hercule Poirot and he will crack the murder mystery because he’s the self-proclaimed “greatest detective of the world”.
Poirot is considerably infatuated with order and balance –starting from meticulously probing his morning breakfast’s two hard boiled eggs, making certain that they are of the same size.
Apart from these odd tendencies, he also has unbelievable telepathic skills. Towards the culmination of the movie, he has single handedly identified all the clues, answered all queries and solved the entire murder enigma. Everything is so tied up in a bloody little bow that it’s almost disappointing to see Poirot overcome every challenge effortlessly. Put him on a show like Criminal Minds and every mystery would be solved within minutes.
The plot of Murder on the Orient Express is well known to those who have neither read the novel nor watched the 1974 adaption by Sydney Lumet. Helming this popular project, Branagh has managed to amass big names like Penelope Cruz, Willem Dafoe, Judi Dench, Johnny Depp, Josh Gad, Derek Jacobi, Leslie Odom Jr, Michelle Pfeiffer, Daisy Ridley for his lavish production. But let us not get too overwhelmed as majority of the screen time is bestowed to Branagh himself. The rest of the far too gifted performers do not get a chance to stand out and appear to be merely wasting their talent and time, lost in cinematic clutter on screen. This latter directorial blunder is a bit too obvious to overlook.
The finest aspect of the movie is perhaps its cinematography. Shot with 65mm cameras, Barnagh has skillfully captured tight spaces of the train’s inside as well as some amazing panning shots of the trains’ exterior. The camerawork sets the tone and gives the movie an old fashioned look. One might actually want to take a rail-journey like that one day, except for the murder of course (Unless you’re Dahmer but I digress).
If you liked Murder on the Orient Express, you should also watch 1974’s And Then There were None in which a bunch of strangers are stacked together, a gruesome murder spree begins, but this time there’s no psychic Poirot to save them.
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