Everything That Is Wrong With Hollywood In 2017

Rating: 4/10 (11 February 2018)

This particular murder of the Orient Express is almost the perfect snapshot of everything wrong with the bewildered and ailing dream factory of Hollywood in the 21st century: remaking things that don't need remaking, adding presently fashionable political causes - as well as lashings and lashings of CGI - and removing all the qualities which made the originals so beloved in the first place, such as a plausible and well told story, peopled with characters one feels a connection to and can remember 5 minutes after it's over.
Like the Guy Ritchie travesty of Sherlock, Stock & Two Smoking Holmes, Kenneth Brannagh has crowbarred into this genteel whodunnit a glut of fistfights, love interests (for Poirot!), and Hobbit-looking computer-generated backdrops that end up making every outdoor scene look like a video game. Racial themes and dialogue addressing said racial themes are pulled out of the air and clumsily forced into the story where they never have felt the need to appear before in 80 years of dramatizations, and in ways that only hold up or detract from the original tale, taking up time that could have been used to elucidate various plot points (such as the explanation for the number of knife wounds in the murder) which would have strengthened the internal logic of the movie and the emotional weight.
Brannagh, too, is unmemorable in everything but his mustache in his performance as Poirot, and is physically entirely wrong for the part. His Poirot doesn't actually get to bust out his wing chung moves, or pop a cap in anybody's derrière, but it's not far off.
STOP "REBOOTING" THINGS THAT WERE PERFECTLY FINE THE FIRST TIME ROUND! The magic of cinema is in its immortalizing of fleeting moments of beauty and greatness for all time - Casablanca is right there on the shelf for you to experience any time you want to: it doesn't need turning into an Adam Sandler musical set in space.
But if you're GOING to carry on regardless, then try be faithful to the narrative you are telling, concentrate first and foremost on a flawless story, and on getting unforgettable moments and performances out of your cast and crew up there on the screen for eternity. This film contains not even one, and all the problems I've listed above will look worse and worse and worse to every successive generation that watches this from here on, until it falls into deserved obscurity and is forgotten completely 30 years from now.
It's a handsomely designed movie, doing its sweaty-faced best to make the sleeping car-bound mystery as big and cinematic as possible, and I applaud Kenneth Brannagh for trying, but I could tell even from the film poster this was going to be a travesty, and it was.