A truly horrific piece of film making

Rating: 2/10 (28 November 2017)

This absolute turkey of a film, was barely entertaining. I wanted to walk out several times, and only the presence of a few tolerant, long suffering, and bored friends kept me from doing so.
The entire cast was wrong. Branagh was an insufferable detective. Dench was a dreadful princess. Cruz was entirely miscast, as some sort of anti fascist. Johnny Depp was barely there, though he did remind me a bit of a kind of impotent Dillinger. This film was truly awful.
As is suggested by the title, one of the first class passengers is brutally murdered. Poirot, hoping for some rest and relaxation, is pressed into service. One of these supposedly respectable passengers is actually a murderer, etc. Thus begins a mystery that is at turns plodding, irrelevant and completely suspense-free. If you remember the famous third act twist it doesn't even really matter; by that point in the movie the narrative has become such a limp pretzel of halfhearted knots that the big revelation comes off as a whimper and not a bang. This is less a whodunit than a who-the-hell-cares.
Branagh was more interested in the Shakespearean drama than dazzling visual effects.
With "Murder on the Orient Express," he has created a contraption that is wholly devoid of cleverness; a thriller without any actual thrills. He seems chiefly concerned with technically virtuoso camera movements that mean incredibly little both in terms of narrative or character, as well as how to showcase himself (as an actor) completely in any given scene. Seriously, Kenneth Branagh shoots Kenneth Branagh like Steven Soderbergh shot Julia Roberts in the first "Ocean's Eleven" – lovingly, with every moment suggesting this is what a movie star looks like.
Sadly, for all of his pomp and forced eccentricity (his walrus-like mustache, his Belgian accent, his protruding belly), Branagh's over sized Poirot can't enliven the movie very much. The same goes for the cast of characters, some of whom have been excellent in other, far better movies this year ("The Florida Project," "Victoria & Abdul," "mother!"). Some, like Daisy Ridley, have the look on their faces like they signed up for something that ended up being altogether different. And no matter how great you are as an actor, it's hard to stay away from the story's inherent stagings, especially in the third act, when Branagh assembles his cast like the participants of the Last Supper. It doesn't feel like a dramatic centerpiece, it feels like a promotional photo shoot. And that's a problem for a movie that should, had it succeeded, built tiny, laser-focused vignettes of suspense out of exchanges of dialogue, camera movements that tracked up and down the train and casual interactions between passengers.
Instead, Branagh presents something like an attractively wrapped present with nothing inside. Ostensibly, it's a well-made movie, with first class production and costume design and some very talented visual effects artists working on very unconvincing visual effects. Even composer Patrick Doyle, one of Branagh's key collaborators, delivers a score that is, like the rest of the movie, both overbearing and tension-free.
Overlong and joyless, it's the cinematic equivalent of a giant, opulent express train trapped in the snow, heaving and off balance.