Goddamn, this movie has no right to be as boring as it is and also have a budget of 50 million dollars. There's a few nuggets of gold, some good and even great scenes here and there with combination of score and decent cinematography; but overall, I kept checking the time like every 10 minutes. Whenever I watch a movie, and I'm constantly waiting for the movie to just end, or I'm checking the time in boredom, the movie automatically gets a below average rating. The number one goal of any filmmaker should be to keep the audience interested. I was not interested throughout the majority of this. Nothing gripped me. There was no tension. The style just didn't lend itself to this kind of story. I don't know who looked at this final product and decided it would work in appealing to a mainstream audience. It's slothy with poor pacing, mediocre acting, half-decent music, amateurish camera work, and only a couple good scene set-ups. I can now say with full confidence I think Daisy Ridley is a bad actress...
I really don't know what else to say. Just don't bother with it. I'm going to go watch the original by Sidney Lumet now. Should be way more interesting and worthwhile. I need to get into the habit of just walking out of movies I don't like. I've never done it, but I need to start doing it.
I've never read MotOE before so I don't know if it differs from the book. I will say that this is not the most red herring plot twisty mystery movie I've ever seen. Of course that title goes to Clue but this film isn't even second place. There are turns and just a few twists. Enough that I felt satisfied but not so many that it felt cheesy. A big thing for me with mystery media is whether or not I could have solved it. One of the most frustrating things for me reading The Red Headed League (iirc) was that the key clue for Sherlock was dirt on the knees of a man who came to the door. A clue that was not described and thus I had no chance to untangle. It's much easier and thus much less forgivable in visual media for clues to be hidden away where I can't see them.
All of this to conclude that MotOE does a good job of providing clues that someone paying attention could pick up on. I didn't solve everything but when Poirot solved a question I felt like I immediately saw how he did it and that if I had wanted to pause the film I might have been able to solve it as he did. Not for every clue or every twist but for enough that I felt satisfied. All in all I was happy with it.
The Five Emojis of Murder on the Orient Express
:heart_eyes:
:smiley:
A star-struck cast with many different personas; the film mostly manages to give everyone enough space.
Kenneth Branagh has crafted a stylish film that captures the look and feel of the era.
Some very interesting choices of camera placements, giving us a good understanding of the tight space onboard the train.
As a character-driven film the different characters do feel distinct and are all well performed.
:neutral_face:
Branagh is alright as Poirot, even though he is clearly overshadowed by better performances by other actors.
Refreshing to see a remake that has not been made into an action spectacle, but retained the Christie feel from the novel. This decision makes the film very slow and at times dragged out as well.
The best jokes land just right, but most of the humor feels too forced to be funny.
It's a shame Derek Jacobi, Judi Dench and Willem Dafoe don't have bigger roles.
:frowning2:
This version brings nothing new to the table, and that's a crucial mistake for a story that has been adapted several times.
The solution to the mystery feels too simple and doesn't really satisfy.
Most of the stuff before the murder is uninteresting but pivotal.
The middle part is very repetitive and dragged out and the ending should have been more forceful.
There's a lack of proper excitement and tension.
:face_vomiting:
The Final Emoji: :neutral_face:
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParent2018-04-27T15:00:44Z
[5.6/10] WARNING: Vague References to Spoilers
Murder on the Orient Express rises and falls on the strength of its main creative force, with Kenneth Branagh pulling double duty as both star and director. He assumes the role of Hercule Poirot, the protagonist of a long series of Agatha Christie mysteries. And in his attempt to bring one of literature’s famous figures to life, Branagh goes at the effort with full bore, both behind and in front of the camera.
But Braunaugh’s new cinematic persona is more caricature than character, more mustache than man. Murder wants it both ways – it wants Poirot to be a man teeming with quirks and cartoonish qualities, while also having this fraught moral journey over the course of the film.
Those two goals aren’t necessarily incompatible. There’s no reason outsized characters can’t be brought down to earth for stark realizations or play with different tones at different points in the production. But Murder never really threads that needle. Instead, Poirot is introduced as a man devoted to the notion of an exacting, impossible symmetry to the world, and a moral code to match, that tracks as silly (mostly in a good way), only to then ask the audience to feel the weight of that code being challenged by the events on that train, in a way that rarely lines up with the figure Branagh's detective cuts.
I have to give Murder this though. While somewhat simplistic for this day and age, it commits to giving Poirot that journey, albeit one that can’t help but feel a bit rote in the post-Sopranos age where morally compromising protagonists are a dime a dozen. There’s a least the germ of a good idea here – that Poirot can’t stand to perceive anything in the world being out of place, literally or spiritually, but comes to accept a shade more of complexity once he starts trying to uncover what’s been made askew on the titular train. In the decades since the novel the film’s based on was released, that mild transformation can’t help but feel a little rudimentary, but it’s also sturdy enough as a place for the character to go.
It’s just a bit of a slog to get from point A to point B. The best thing to recommend Murder is its cast, filled with both heavy hitters, talented character actors, and resurgent stars from years past. The film tries to take advantage of this fact, positioning itself as an actor’s showcase. While there’s a handful of scenes featuring the interactions of the whole lot, the showpieces of Murder are, more often, the more intimate scenes between Branagh and one of his many co-stars, as Poirot interrogates the passengers on the train.
The problem is that most of these scenes fall pretty flat. For whatever reason, Branaugh just cannot find the right chemistry between himself and his fellow performers, either as an actor or a director. None of the performances in the film sink to the level of bad – these are all pros and everyone manages to hit “good enough” at worst – but none really sparkles either.
The one exception on both counts is the pairing between Branagh and Daisy Ridley of Star Wars fame. Whatever the reason, there’s something about the eccentric kindness of Branaugh’s Poirot and the young but not exactly naïve qualities of Ridley’s Mary Hermione Debenham that sync up better than any other duo in the film. Murder comes alive in the scenes where the two are on screen together (something the editors seem to acknowledge given how these scenes are spotlighted) while remaining sleepy almost everywhere else.
That sleepiness could be mistaken for elegance. Murder is a film that wants to impress you with its costuming and period flourishes, as a fun little picture box of the 1930s. It has the slick look of a costume drama while indulging in its pulpier thrills. But it’s also a bit confused on that front. While the characters cut the figures of sophisticates with secrets to match their class, the film occasionally tries to lurch out of that well-clad stuffiness and embrace oddly gratuitous CGI fireworks or the cheap fisticuffs and high drama of any old action movie. The one-room mystery quality of Murder gives it some intrigue out of the gate, but when it departs from those cozy confines for Branaugh, it feels miscalibrated.
Unfortunately, the film’s take on the mystery is no great shakes either. While a nice spine to anchor Murder’s mustache-driven cast interactions around, the movie suffers from the inevitable compression that comes when hundreds of pages of a novel are winnowed into a two hour production.
While a book, particularly a mystery book, gives the reader enough time to meet each character, get to know them a little while evaluation their possible motives and alibis, and then be appropriately surprised or reassured when the answer to “whodunit” is revealed, the film version of Murder, understandably, spends most of its early run introducing us to Poirot, and a few others. Then we get bare, drive-by introductions for the rest of the cast, only to dive right into whether they might have some grudge or connection to the deceased. It makes each twist have less impact than the last, as some shocking character reveal is only shocking if you feel like you know who a character was supposed to be when it’s shown who they really are.
Instead, Murder lands with a thud in the final act, with the grandest twist of them all that has the slightest bit of juice from its novelty as an answer to the “whodunit” that’s retained all these years later, but gets lost in the overwrought drama of a desired emotional reaction that the film never really earns. There’s good bits and pieces here – there couldn’t help but be with this many talented actors in the cast – but they’re never connected or distinctive enough to make the tapestry the film means to weave seem compelling.
Instead, Murder on the Orient Express is a perfectly fine film, something that amounts to some tasty-enough cinematic candy for the period piece set. It rarely holds your attention, but never causes you to turn away either, giving you just enough moments of levity or intrigue to stick around while never quite offering enough to draw you in. The closing moments of the film promise more adventures for the mustachioed detective, but if they come, let’s hope they manage to stay on track better than this one did.