moral justice vs legal justice

Rating: 5/10 (18 December 2017)

This isn't the film to watch if you want to horn your deductive skills and outsmart the deceptive ploy of red herrings in a fine detective movie for such should be the joy of solving the puzzle and beating the house in this kind of genre. It should be a wrestle of the minds on observations and logical deductions against the smoke and mirrors of deception. The test of skills for filmmakers and script writers of this kind is to fool the audience in such a way that makes revelationary sense when the truth is revealed. This is not the case for Kenneth Branagh who is both the director and the star who played the famous detective Hercule Poirot. He in his character is too eager to pontificate like a running Wikipedia with mustache with his knowledge on the back story of the Armstrong murder as if he wrote the scripts to both murders past and present. The audience is left passively in the backseat like some numb and mindless spectators to this sport-event like commentary. This isn't how a detective film should be. However, if you decided that it isn't a detective film but a film that questions moral justice over legal justice, the film does present that as a case for Poirot to solve and he solves it quickly in which moral justice prevails. In that sense, the film is not entirely heartless. The visuals are very nice, especially the wide establishing shots of the train speeding through the snow storm in the wilderness of the mountains, thus setting the stage where because it is so far from civilization, morality is justifiably above the law.