Kenneth Branagh, “Murder on the Orient Express ” (2017)
At least superficially this film is quite enjoyable to see Agatha Christie’s famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot (played here by Kenneth Branagh who also directed the film) solve the whodunnit mystery in brisk and no-nonsense style amid lavish surroundings and a dramatic (if computer-enhanced) Alpine mountain landscape. Branagh preens his way through nearly every shot and scene as the famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot at the expense of his co-stars, many of whom are equally as illustrious as he if not more so. Viewers keen on solving the mystery before Poirot does are given plenty of clues and a back-story to the shenanigans on board the famous Orient Express train.
Summoned by London to return from the Middle East, Poirot meets Xavier Bouc, the son of an old friend, who is the director of the Orient Express and who promptly offers him a place on board. After meeting a number of passengers – who, oddly, total no more than thirteen – Poirot is approached by an American art dealer, Ratchett (Johnny Depp), who wants Poirot to be his bodyguard: Ratchett has received some threatening letters and fears someone on the train is out to kill him. Poirot senses that Ratchett is an unpleasant fellow and refuses to protect him. During the night strange noises emanate from Ratchett’s compartment and in the morning he is found dead from twelve stab wounds. Poirot and Bouc set about solving the mystery of Ratchett’s death and Poirot discovers from a clue left at the crime scene that Ratchett is in fact John Cassetti, a criminal who years ago had kidnapped and murdered a child, Daisy Armstrong. The kidnapping and murder led to the death of Daisy’s mother and the eventual suicide of her father, John. The family’s housemaid Susanne was wrongly arrested and charged with the murder and the trial judge was under pressure to convict her. Susanne later committed suicide in prison.
Armed with this information, Poirot eventually discovers through interviewing all the passengers on the train, plus one of the train conductors, that every single person aboard (save himself, Bouc and the train staff) is connected to the Armstrong family in some way. Alert viewers can guess which of these people will have had a hand in Ratchett’s murder before Poirot makes his announcement in an anti-climactic climax in which all the accused are assembled in a tableau resembling Leonardo da Vinci’s painting “The Last Supper”. Poirot subsequently finds himself in a dilemma torn between his excessively neat and tidy rational worldview, in which humans behave in ways that are logically transparent, and the real messy world in which people, governed by emotions and motivations they often cannot understand in themselves, perform criminal acts without regard for the consequences … and yet if they do not perform such acts, they may end up trapped in a depressive limbo or resort to the comfort of addictive painkiller drugs or even suicide.
The film has no easy answer for Poirot’s dilemma and he is forced to back down before a very minor character’s pragmatic decision regarding the fate of the guilty party / parties. At the end of the film he is left angry and discontented by the events on the Orient Express and only a new summons from London directing him back to Egypt and a trip down the Nile River (which means that Branagh may be coming back with his version of “Death on the Nile”!) holds out a promise that his universe will neatly resolve and repair itself back into tidy order.
While Branagh walks a balance between comic silliness and in-your-face seriousness for much of the film, and Depp oozes genuine menace in the few scenes he has, other capable actors have very little to do: the characters played by Willem Dafoe, Judi Dench and Derek Jacobi could have been played by lesser actors and Penelope Cruz has great difficulty playing a guilt-ridden missionary. Michelle Pfeiffer puts on a bravura performance as Mrs Hubbard towards the film’s end but by then viewers will think this is too little, too late.
Various tweaks have been made to the plot and some of the characters for the insertion of unnecessary and annoying identity-politics issues (such as making one character black so that Poirot is forced into solving the murder mystery before police authorities catch up and arrest that black character for the murder) that add nothing to the plot or to the overarching theme of Poirot encountering a chaotic and irrational universe and pushing back with deductive reasoning and logic. An unnecessary opening scene in which Poirot presides, god-like, over an incident involving the three Abrahamic religions in Jerusalem comes across as prejudiced against religion and racist to boot. The film also delights too much in overhead shots, long panning and CGI-generated shots of the Orient Express stranded on a bridge in an artificial-looking montane landscape.
If, as seems likely, a sequel is to be made – Hollywood being intent on cannibalising all its old movies, turning away from contemporary story scenarios that might reveal a United States in cultural as well as political, economic and financial stagnation and decline – please someone stop Branagh from directing the film: on “Murder …”, he just gets too carried away by his character Poirot and the film’s visual and technical aspects to care about the rest of the cast and the story.