Kenneth Branagh’s second adaptation of the classic Agatha Christie novel – a sequel to 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express – is an entertaining detective story. But unlike its predecessor, it falls quite short of fulfillment.
This is a shame. Adapting Agatha Christie’s classic murder mysteries seem like a good way to keep the bygone genre of detective stories alive. This genre received renewed interest after Branagh’s first effort at a Hercule Poirot story. But the reception was lukewarm. Only with Rian Johnson’s original effort Knives Out did interest in the genre returned in force.
Sadly – perhaps because Knives Out was too hell-bent on breaking the mold – that film did not lead to the return of the classic detective formula. Interest in the genre quickly waned. Once again, Rian Johnson lovingly breaks a classic property to pieces.
Because of this, I was looking forward to seeing this star-studded classic adaptation. The trailer had shown Gal Gadot, Armie Hammer, Letitia Wright, Russell Brande, Annette Benning, and Kenneth Branagh’s mustache – rest in peace – all in their full glories. Many people, me included, were excited.
That’s why it’s really a shame that this story seems not to have been given the care it really deserves.
From the beginning, something was off. I realized that while this film boasts beautiful cinematography, the flow of the story, both script-wise and editing-wise, is really jarring.
Analyzed as a whole, one can see how different plot points connect to each other, how certain character beats inform later actions, how specific shots are set-ups for later pay-offs. But like Hercule Poirot, it takes us a fatally long time to deduce all that.
As an experience, the film feels clumsy. It has a plan that is executed very poorly. There is, for instance, an overarching theme about love and its values. It appears both as a centerpiece of the mystery and as a dilemma with which many of our main characters must wrestle.
So obviously, someone sat down and decided that this film should have a theme and it should permeate all its elements. That’s a good start. But then that’s all they really do. They plant dialogs with the word “love”, romance subplots, and scenes of intimacy and seduction, all to invoke said theme. But they fail to make any of that consequential. Or when the theme does become consequential, they never resonate with me. They often feel out-of-place or unbelievable.
It’s as if they’ve added an ingredient to a dish but never heated or cooked them together. The result is that the theme feels separated from the film itself. And the film as a whole feels undercooked.
The lack of flow does not impede individual scenes and moments when the crescendos of sights and sounds really do evoke excitement. Chase scenes were well shot and gripping. And there are beautiful shots of the Nile River, the Pyramid, and the cruise, all of which help us settle into the environment.
But in the quieter moments, the directing overshadows the dialog. Interrogation scenes felt overplayed due to the insistence on fast cuts and eye-catching camera angles. One such scene saw the camera spinning around the characters to evoke dynamic. It just felt dizzying and distracting.
(Image credit: The Telegraph)
In all these instances, the filmmakers should have trusted the dialogs and the actors, both of which are for the most part top-notch.
However, I must leave a side note: The actor who plays the murderer in this film, either played a killer playing an innocent really well or was just really bad at playing someone innocent. Either way, because of that performance, I immediately suspected s/he was the killer. And I was right.
This makes the reveal less interesting for me. But that usually is not a bother. For this film, the problem was the tediousness of the investigative process. A good detective story must make us frustrated with the difficulty of the mystery. But here, we feel frustrated with Poirot. We empathized more with the passengers of the cruise who were frustrated with Poirot. This was not, or should not be the intended effect.
This, I think is also a symptom of undercooking. The filmmakers know the formula of the detective story but need the practice to tell them in a compelling well. They need to trust the dialog and give more care and attention to the overall flow of the film, not just the hooks of the individual moments. Only with those improvements, can the flavor of this great Agatha Christie story come to life.
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