Suicide on the Re-make Express

Rating: 4/10 (17 November 2017)

Even if it had not been done before (and very well at that) this return trip on The Orient Express turns out to be a rather tepid mystery excursion. Given its cast and author's (Agatha Christie) pedigree it lags well behind the locomotive powering it as director/ lead Ken Branagh gets sloppy with wasteful incidentals and issues unrelated to the mystery at hand.
Hercule Poirot agrees to hitching a ride on The Orient Express from Istanbul to Paris. When a shady character (Johnny Depp) is brutally offed, Poirot is enlisted to solve the crime with a captive audience of suspects in a snowbound train waiting for AAA to rescue them.
While I find the story to be one of Christie's more unsatisfying offerings it does offer up a dozen fun characters and suspects that can allow major stars a chance to ham it up. The cast is A list (Judy Dench, Derek, Jacobi, Michelle Pfieffer, Penelope Cruz, William Dafoe) but the performances mostly D as they are barely able to muster guilty expressions. There are some fine montages of the locomotive flexing its powerful muscles but moments where it looks like an American Flyer set up in a department store window as it moves through the snow covered terrain.
It is impossible for me not to mention the 74 classic if only to highly recommend it as well as the managing of the cast in comparison's to Branagh's half inspired handling of his. Director Sidney Lumet (12 Angry Men) excelled at balancing and involving his cast who nearly to a member give wonderful broad performances. Branagh on the other hand lowers his suspect count, all but ignoring some of the other passengers implicated. Branagh himself is little less than a mawkish ghost of the brilliant Albert Finney's Poirot who conducted on stage the energy and fun that is missing in this present day version, it is simply the little engine that couldn't. It should have never left the station.