‘Murder on the Orient Express’ Review: Losing Track of Entertainment - WSJ: Kenneth Branagh’s version of the Agatha Christie classic is more punishment than crime.
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Watch a clip from ‘Murder on the Orient Express,’ starring Johnny Depp, Pen�lope Cruz and Kenneth Branagh. Photo: Twentieth Century Fox
By Joe Morgenstern
Nov. 9, 2017 1:44 p.m. ET
49 COMMENTS
A dispatcher must have put the train on the wrong track. “Murder on the Orient Express” was meant to zip along in the realm of stylish comedy, not chug through turgid drama that ends up contemplating the nature of man. Kenneth Branagh’s version starts promisingly enough with a lyrical, pirouetting shot of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem in 1934. By the end, though, this entirely superfluous remake will have you bewailing the state of entertainment along with the fate of novelist Agatha Christie, whose quaint old wheeze of a parlor-car game deserved to stay fondly remembered.
00:00 / 00:58
Watch a clip from ‘Murder on the Orient Express,’ starring Johnny Depp, Pen�lope Cruz and Kenneth Branagh. Photo: Twentieth Century Fox
By Joe Morgenstern
Nov. 9, 2017 1:44 p.m. ET
49 COMMENTS
A dispatcher must have put the train on the wrong track. “Murder on the Orient Express” was meant to zip along in the realm of stylish comedy, not chug through turgid drama that ends up contemplating the nature of man. Kenneth Branagh’s version starts promisingly enough with a lyrical, pirouetting shot of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem in 1934. By the end, though, this entirely superfluous remake will have you bewailing the state of entertainment along with the fate of novelist Agatha Christie, whose quaint old wheeze of a parlor-car game deserved to stay fondly remembered.