‘Murder On The Orient Express’ Is A Joyless Ride [Review]

Now seems like a good time for a new take on “Murder on the Orient Express.” Sidney Lumet had memorably adapted the Agatha Christie novel (originally published in 1934) back in 1974 (Ingrid Bergman won an Oscar for her role in the film) but a more modern take on both the story’s classic whodunit mechanics and its cast of racially diverse characters could have been an absolute treat. It could have been enough of a throwback to seem quaint, spiced with contemporary pizzazz to make it seem relevant. Unfortunately, this new “Murder on the Orient Express,” full of movie stars and fake snow and perfect for holiday viewing, is an unceremonious dud. It’s a lumbering, star-studded bore that fritters away whatever relevance it could have, instead focusing on tedious set pieces and smug artificiality.

This “Murder on the Orient Express” begins in the Middle East in 1934. Our focus is on Hercule Poirot (played by Kenneth Branagh, also the director), a Sherlock Holmes-ian detective, who is tasked with solving a crime involving a religious artifact. It doesn’t much matter. The introductory scenes just establish that Poirot is a genius investigator and that, thanks to another case, he has to hastily board the Orient Express. (So much for his vacation.) It’s on the train that he meets a cast of uniformly handsome and utterly bored movie stars, dressed up as swinging eccentrics who can barely hide their secrets underneath their rococo costumes. There’s Penelope Cruz as a frazzled missionary, Willem Dafoe as a Germanic professor, Judi Dench as a hoity Russian Princess, Daisy Ridley as a mysterious governess, Michelle Pfeiffer as a man-hungry widow, Leslie Odom Jr. as a doctor and Johnny Depp as a sneering gangster. (Josh Gad, Derek Jacobi, and Olivia Colman serve as various versions of “the help.”)

As is suggested by the title, one of the first class passengers is brutally murdered. Poirot, hoping for some rest and relaxation, is pressed into service. One of these supposedly respectable passengers is actually a murderer, etc. Thus begins a mystery that is at turns plodding, irrelevant and completely suspense-free. If you remember the famous third act twist it doesn’t even really matter; by that point in the movie the narrative has become such a limp pretzel of halfhearted knots that the big revelation comes off as a whimper and not a bang. This is less a whodunit than a who-the-fuck-cares.

And almost all of the blame rests on the shoulders of Branagh. As a filmmaker he can either be boldly expressive (“Dead Again,” “Hamlet“) or safe and ineffective (“Sleuth,” “Frankenstein“). Lately he’s been working on poorly conceived studio projects like “Cinderella” and “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit“; some might have made money, but creatively they’ve been pretty spent. “Thor” is actually a bright spot amongst these movies, even though it’s clear from the film that Branagh was more interested in the Shakespearean drama than dazzling visual effects.

With “Murder on the Orient Express,” he has created a contraption that is wholly devoid of cleverness; a thriller without any actual thrills. He seems chiefly concerned with technically virtuosic camera movements that mean incredibly little both in terms of narrative or character, as well as how to showcase himself (as an actor) completely in any given scene. Seriously, Kenneth Branagh shoots Kenneth Branagh like Steven Soderbergh shot Julia Roberts in the first “Ocean’s Eleven” – lovingly, with every moment suggesting this is what a movie star looks like.

Sadly, for all of his pomp and forced eccentricity (his walrus-like mustache, his Belgian accent, his protruding belly), Branagh’s oversized Poirot can’t enliven the movie very much. The same goes for the cast of characters, some of whom have been excellent in other, far better movies this year (“The Florida Project,” “Victoria & Abdul,” “mother!”). Some, like Daisy Ridley, have the look on their faces like they signed up for something that ended up being altogether different. And no matter how great you are as an actor, it’s hard to stay away from the story’s inherent staginess, especially in the third act, when Branagh assembles his cast like the participants of the Last Supper. It doesn’t feel like a dramatic centerpiece, it feels like a promotional photo shoot. And that’s a problem for a movie that should, had it succeeded, built tiny, laser-focused vignettes of suspense out of exchanges of dialogue, camera movements that tracked up and down the train and casual interactions between passengers.

Instead, Branagh presents something like an attractively wrapped present with nothing inside. Ostensibly, it’s a well-made movie, with first class production and costume design and some very talented visual effects artists working on very unconvincing visual effects. Even composer Patrick Doyle, one of Branagh’s key collaborators, delivers a score that is, like the rest of the movie, both overbearing and tension-free.

Sometimes it seems like Branagh took the wrong lesson from his time at Marvel and instead of crafting a compelling character piece that doubled as an edge-of-your-seat thriller, he was content just shuffling around a bunch of larger-than-life characters while his part, as a morally upstanding sleuth, could move on to other adventures. (And, indeed, there is a strained shout-out towards the end of the movie to another Christie/Poirot case.) It would have been a different story had the director found time to devote a fraction of the attention to the other passengers on the train as he did to himself.

Overlong and joyless, it’s the cinematic equivalent of a giant, opulent express train trapped in the snow, heaving and off balance. Buy another ticket. Skip this train. [D]