Nice try but no cigars...

Rating: 5/10 (8 December 2019)

A Stella cast carrying a whodunit will depend entirely on the story... Sadly, instead of "the plot thickens", it thins out unbearably...
Overall the movie was entertaining enough to watch... But the plot was stretched a little thin and the ending was disappointing...
A whodunit works by bringing the audience along to try to figure out the crime and be pleasantly surprised at the big reveal... This movie decided at the half way point that it no longer wants to be a whodunit and we no longer should follow along as it does its own thing... Sigh...
I wouldn't recommend this to anyone who truly enjoy the genre..
Spoiler Alert...
Let's tackle the minor annoyances first...
1) The beginning sets everyone out as having a motive to murder... Standard for the genre but here, it stops there...
No building up of everyone/anyone who also had the opportunity to commit the murder... Motive without opportunity doesn't add up to murder...
This means... Before the middle of the story, we have already eliminated almost everyone as the suspect... Which kinda defeats the whodunit plotline...
2) Having a girl who is a witness who vomits if she lies is extremely convenient for a murder detective... And... Surely any investigator will target her for as much information as possible...
Here however, to preserve the big reveal later I guess, they let her off without ever really questioning her...(even Ransom got more information than the investigators did...)
In fact, the detectives were more interested in talking to Benoit and kept telling her to go away after finding out this rather beneficial condition...
This leaves a feeling of a weak plot that cannot exclude her from some crucial events...
She didn't have to witness the suicide... Which in itself didn't add anything to the story... And with that, she could spill the beans on what she did and we can all still believe there was further foul play involved...
3) Marta and Benoit find the hidden tox report after spending hours to chase it down... Yet they can sit down to have a chat after finding it but neither even opened it to take a look?
This gives us the scene where she was about to confess in front of the whole family but was stopped in mid sentence... Drama!!!!
That's ridiculous and again feels forced/false...
4) Walt confronts Marta at her home... He evades the horde of reporters and came in via the back way...
Firstly, a rich guy like him would likely never have to use the back way and wouldn't be able to find one...
Secondly, Walt is the 'boss' of a printing empire and it's unreasonable that nobody in the media recognises him...
Thirdly, he walks/limps with a cane...
Is he really the best person to go seek Marta out under the circumstance?
Wouldn't Meg, Donna or Jacob be better suited for the stealth-required mission?
5) Captain frigging America... Emm, I mean Ransom... When he left and came back, wouldn't that be recorded in the early part of the surveillance video? He stopped exactly where she stopped...
Ok, this one, maybe I can accept the reason is he knows the area well and was able to evade detection... Still unsatisfying though...
6) Fran wants to confront Ransom believing he killed Harlan...a woman, confronting a man/killer even if he's not Captain America, surely wouldn't choose an abandoned/creepy location to meet..
What does she think will happen? This is not a slasher flick where dumb teenagers go into the room despite multiple warnings not to...
7) Harlan was in a terrible rush to kill himself...
Marta explained that he will die in
10 minutes... And at around the 5 minutes mark, he will sweat profusely and have some other symptoms...
Wouldn't a normal person wait until the symptoms start to show before reaching for the knife?

Many more minor niggles like Benoit not needing to introduce himself before sitting inside the house witnessing all the 'interrogations'... -There seem to be no other maids or servants in such a huge, well maintained house, that needed to be questioned... -Marta just happens to have a large magnet in her pocket for erasing a video tape... -Nobody who wasn't around needs to have an alibi for their whereabouts...-none of the other detectives see the blood stain on Marta's shoe...
Too many roll eyes moments for a whodunit plot...
Now...
Let's get to the parts that killed the movie/story...
1) Benoit doing his best Poirot... And gave too much details without any evidence...
Examples...-He could simply say Ransom switched the medication.. But instead, he goes into details of how he sucked out medication from one bottle and then from the other bottle... How would he know that?
-How did he deduce that it was Ransom who sent him the cash?
-How can he be so sure that a person with dementia simply didn't mix up 'back' and 'back again'... Very thin even if we can accept the inference...
If he's wrong at any point, Ransom could stop him and the story telling ends...
These plus some other details he brought up without any evidence shows that he is just showboating and not very professional... He should be more mindful of his reputation... And this goes against his persona of being careful with what he says as shown in the beginning...
2) the claim is that Ransom torched the examiners' office the night before... And yet in the morning light (actually around 9am already...) and the fire on that not-large building seem to just get going... In real life, it should be ashes before daylight... Unless it was touched an hour or two before 9am...
Since Ransom was with Marta in the morning, he couldn't have done it...
3) we were told that overdose of morphine means dying in 10 minutes...
When Marta found Fran, Ransom was in police custody and there was nobody else around... She should be the prime suspect...
And obviously, Ransom couldn't have done that too...
4) in the scene where she makes her escape after the will reading...the family couldn't stop her if she wanted to drive away... Richard said something like, what do you want me to do, bite the bumper?(to stop her leaving...)... But when she came out of the car, push through the crowd to get into Ransom's car, not a single person stopped her getting in...
This is of course essential for her to spend quality time with Ransom... Totally unrealistic...
In conclusion...As said... Not bad entertainment (6-7) but a terrible whodunit (2-3)... So around 4.5 overall...