Basically, my feeling towards disliking this runs on the same reason for why I couldn’t justify the need for Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley remake, except here’s a major difference: Kenneth Branagh is no del Toro when it comes to directing, in fact, he isn’t remotely close; if anything, he’s even inconsistent as one too, which del Toro at least had the decency to avoid regarding the neat visual execution of his revamp, but Branagh treats his like a pretentious flaunt of random ideas.
Oh yeah, and regarding how he and Michael Green redraft Agatha Christie’s classic story? Well, besides maybe chronologically switching events from the original movie for no other reason then to make the execution sloppier and different for the sake of being different — not to mention injecting occasional racism commentary into the mouths of white people living during the 1930s, two of the s**ttiest action sequences I’ve seen in a while, and Hollywood-izing the drama in almost every character outburst and reveal to death especially in its god-awful sap of a climax — he doesn’t add shit besides this modern gloss for modern eyes, unless this is supposed to he a hearken back to old Hollywood melodrama, in which case, this is an even bigger failure than I had suspected.
However, I’ll give Branagh this though, he plays a respectable Hercule Poirot. Some interesting quirk in the cast, but that’s kind of a given, right?
Verdict: D
“Murder on the Orient Express” is now available to rent on Amazon Prime.
Burning the Celluloid 
Published by