All that talent, and so little for anyone to do

Rating: 4/10 (20 November 2017)

I'll start by admitting I've never read the Agatha Christie novel or the original film. I don't have any details from the original story affecting my opinion of this, for better or worse. Branagh's 2017 version is a competent tale of revenge and redemption, complete with a star-studded cast and an Oscar-worthy mustache. Unfortunately, that's about all it has going for it.
I'll get right to it--the movie is boring. And I don't mean that in a "needs more explosions/I prefer all the MCU movies" sort of way. I actually have a predisposition for slow paced, dialogue driven films. The thing is, there actually needs to be interesting dialogue/characters for any of it to work. Just about every major character in this movie is played by a well known actor or actress. This alone does not make them interesting, however, and as the movie plods on, we realize that none of them have anything notable to say or do outside of Branagh's Hercule Poirot. Branagh himself actually puts out a respectable performance, and the mustache really is glorious, but no one else has the material or screen time to be anything more than a vehicle for the plot to get to its underwhelming conclusion.
Everything looks pretty enough. The movie is well-shot, the costumes are full of life, the characters all look important. Then we find out that the only notable thing about every single person on the train is the fact that they're all coincidentally tied to an older case that (also) coincidentally is the one case that haunts our main character. This leads to the obvious conclusion that every guest must be tied to this in some sort of conspiracy, right? Well, yes. That's it. Except most of the audience will figure this out an hour in, and then be forced to watch the greatest detective in the world slowly figure out the same conclusion over the next hour. This would be fine if the movie was building to something greater and unexpected, or was filled with characters that are fun to watch, or included any instances of smart dialogue that wasn't ham-handedly explaining the simple-yet-rushed plot to the audience.
In the end, all we get is the expected conclusion (delivered by Poirot in a five minute expository monologue) tied together with some late themes of revenge and redemption. Nothing about Murder on the Orient Express is explicitly bad or incompetent, but it all just feels simple, rushed, and watered down. Any interesting moments are short lived as the plot rushes to its tired, "It was everyone" ending. Not the worst movie you could find yourself watching, but possibly the most uninteresting.