Murder on the Orient Express

I am a huge lover of Poirot, not just the books but also of David Suchet which made it an agonising choice for me to go and see this film. Kenneth Brannagh is not and will never be as good as David Suchet but he tried to play the character differently, his French accent was acceptable but needs work and his moustache is disgraceful but all in all, once you accept that any new Poirot is unlikely to be better than Suchet then you can move on to attempt to enjoy the film.

I did enjoy it. My one criticism is that Poirot is not as athletic as he was made out to be in this film. The overall portrayal of Poirot was good and fairly accurate but the script writing wasn't anywhere near as good as the scripts written for television. Murder on the Orient Express is the one that David Suchet left to last because it was going to be the strongest test of his role as 'Poirot'. This book in itself is the strongest test of Poirot's character. Nothing about it is easy and nothing becomes clear until Poirot explains it all to you. When reading the book I felt like maybe Poirot had met his match, maybe he didn't solve this one or maybe he caught the wrong person but then once he figured it out (and that took most of the book to do) it made sense and it was an extremely complicated murder. When I watched this film, my companions and I felt that they had explained everything to early. This murder stopped being complicated the moment that he revealed the true name and started asking questions and making obvious assumptions. Branagah's Poirot gave away the missing piece of the puzzle that made it easy for everyone to solve the case. Halfway through the film we all knew and it shouldn't be like that. The book is more complicated, the characters are more complicated and this film didn't really do it justice.

Johnny Depp as Mr. Ratchet was fantastic and the most unlike Johnny Depp I have seen for a while. He wasn't as horrible and disgusting as the previous portrayals of this character have been but he still managed to make it clear that he was going to be murdered without really having to try which made his portrayal almost perfect. Michelle Pfeiffer was also fantastic and I spent most of the film thinking long and hard about who she was. Derek Jacobi cannot change his face so he changed his manner and became a totally different character. Even Daisy Riddley was strong in this movie. Everyone was strong in this movie and if Brannagh had a different moustache and they created a better script than this film would be almost fantastic.

They have set it up to make another film and make some of the books in to movies and that is okay but there are things that they need to work on. The script writer needs to improve and the accent needs a bit of work. The study of the character of Poirot requires further improvement and you can't make the argument of wanting to play the character differently because you have to be true to the character otherwise you end up like Michael Gambon as Albus Dumbledore- destroying the character entirely. Change other things about the movie, focus on other things that are in the books but don't make the character do a lot of running and hitting people because that's not who the character ever was, you need to be cleverer. Not a bad movie, I expected a lot worse but work to be done.