Murder on the Orient Express (2017)

There are times when I will be watching a film, really enjoying it, and suddenly feeling like something is off. I often cannot put my finger on what exactly the flaw is, but because I can’t put my finger on it I dismiss it and still say the movie is good. There are other times, however, when after talking with other people about the film, I understand exactly what the flaw is.

Watching Murder on the Orient Express was one of those experiences. I love myself a good old-school mystery in the vein of Hitchcock films like To Catch a Thief, and my prior experiences with star and director Kenneth Branagh (in particular his four-hour unabridged adaptation of Hamlet) as well as the rest of this star-studded cast made me very excited to see this film. I didn’t expect a fantastic film, but I was secretly hoping that it would revitalize this largely dead genre.

Unfortunately, Murder has one really big flaw that makes it largely forgettable: it doesn’t know how to balance knowledge with intrigue. In mystery novels and short stories, the author often has to walk a delicate line between giving the reader clues to follow and not giving away the end result. Doing this on paper without images is no easy task, but when translated to film this line becomes even thinner. The reactions of the characters have facial expressions and vocal inflections that also need to walk this same line. Murder does not know how to walk this tightrope: it constantly feels like it is forcing various events because they need to happen to get to the end while giving us the audience very little context for said events. This made me more confused than anything because it made the story extremely hard to follow without having read the Agatha Christie novel on which this film is based.

I don’t see this as a flaw with Branagh’s direction or the cast’s performances, as both are solid and don’t disappoint; rather, the fault lies with the writing. The film paces its revelations so unevenly and sporadically that when all is revealed by Branagh’s character at the end, there are things we are just finding out in those last ten minutes that would have given us breadcrumbs to at least guess who committed the crime. The finale makes sense but not until fully unpacking it after the film has already ended. I wouldn’t have minded the film being a little longer to fit in these clues earlier on so that the audience could follow the story more easily; unfortunately, because we don’t get them earlier, we don’t have any way to guess who did it, making the whole film lack the suspense it undoubtedly should have.

I don’t think this is a particularly bad film; on the contrary, most aspects of the film are executed quite well and make the film at least partially enjoyable, especially the acting – the entire cast wowed me, especially Daisy Ridley and Leslie Odom Jr. who I am very happy to say got plenty of deserved screen time to showcase their skills outside of their most familiar roles (Ridley as Rey in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and Odom as Aaron Burr in the musical Hamilton). The problem is that the lack of suspense makes the film boring and stale, and as a result I can’t fully recommend it.

My recommendation: Honestly, it’s probably not worth your time. Skip it.

My grade: 52