Murder on the Orient Express
Director: Kenneth Branagh
Year Released: 2017
Rating: 2.0
Belgian detective (and gastronome) Hercule Poirot (Branagh, doing double duty) has to solve the mystery as to who stabbed shady criminal Ratchett (Johnny Depp) in his room onboard the title luxury train ... and everyone riding along (including Daisy Ridley, Josh Gad and Michelle Pfeiffer) acts awfully suspicious. By now the 'solution' to the crime should be well-known to most readers (or anyone that saw the 1974 Sidney Lumet film version), so all that's left to look at is the work of Branagh in adapting the tale in his own 'style,' and what's in place is a good amount of over-acting and a lot of crummy CGI and God's Eye View camera shots. Even Poirot's final 'breakdown,' explaining to the passengers how he figured out what happened, is met with a shrug and a sigh (which is better than Raymond Chandler's reaction to the Agatha Christie novel: that only "a half-wit could guess it"). I'm going to assume the studied Poirot is aware of Romans 12:19....
