[5.6/10] **WARNING: Vague References to Spoilers**

*Murder on the Orient Express* rises and falls on the strength of its main creative force, with Kenneth Branagh pulling double duty as both star and director. He assumes the role of Hercule Poirot, the protagonist of a long series of Agatha Christie mysteries. And in his attempt to bring one of literature’s famous figures to life, Branagh goes at the effort with full bore, both behind and in front of the camera.

But Braunaugh’s new cinematic persona is more caricature than character, more mustache than man. *Murder* wants it both ways – it wants Poirot to be a man teeming with quirks and cartoonish qualities, while also having this fraught moral journey over the course of the film.

Those two goals aren’t necessarily incompatible. There’s no reason outsized characters can’t be brought down to earth for stark realizations or play with different tones at different points in the production. But *Murder* never really threads that needle. Instead, Poirot is introduced as a man devoted to the notion of an exacting, impossible symmetry to the world, and a moral code to match, that tracks as silly (mostly in a good way), only to then ask the audience to feel the weight of that code being challenged by the events on that train, in a way that rarely lines up with the figure Branagh's detective cuts.

I have to give *Murder* this though. While somewhat simplistic for this day and age, it commits to giving Poirot that journey, albeit one that can’t help but feel a bit rote in the post-*Sopranos* age where morally compromising protagonists are a dime a dozen. There’s a least the germ of a good idea here – that Poirot can’t stand to perceive anything in the world being out of place, literally or spiritually, but comes to accept a shade more of complexity once he starts trying to uncover what’s been made askew on the titular train. In the decades since the novel the film’s based on was released, that mild transformation can’t help but feel a little rudimentary, but it’s also sturdy enough as a place for the character to go.

It’s just a bit of a slog to get from point A to point B. The best thing to recommend *Murder* is its cast, filled with both heavy hitters, talented character actors, and resurgent stars from years past. The film tries to take advantage of this fact, positioning itself as an actor’s showcase. While there’s a handful of scenes featuring the interactions of the whole lot, the showpieces of *Murder* are, more often, the more intimate scenes between Branagh and one of his many co-stars, as Poirot interrogates the passengers on the train.

The problem is that most of these scenes fall pretty flat. For whatever reason, Branaugh just cannot find the right chemistry between himself and his fellow performers, either as an actor or a director. None of the performances in the film sink to the level of bad – these are all pros and everyone manages to hit “good enough” at worst – but none really sparkles either.

The one exception on both counts is the pairing between Branagh and Daisy Ridley of *Star Wars* fame. Whatever the reason, there’s something about the eccentric kindness of Branaugh’s Poirot and the young but not exactly naïve qualities of Ridley’s Mary Hermione Debenham that sync up better than any other duo in the film. *Murder* comes alive in the scenes where the two are on screen together (something the editors seem to acknowledge given how these scenes are spotlighted) while remaining sleepy almost everywhere else.

That sleepiness could be mistaken for elegance. *Murder* is a film that wants to impress you with its costuming and period flourishes, as a fun little picture box of the 1930s. It has the slick look of a costume drama while indulging in its pulpier thrills. But it’s also a bit confused on that front. While the characters cut the figures of sophisticates with secrets to match their class, the film occasionally tries to lurch out of that well-clad stuffiness and embrace oddly gratuitous CGI fireworks or the cheap fisticuffs and high drama of any old action movie. The one-room mystery quality of *Murder* gives it some intrigue out of the gate, but when it departs from those cozy confines for Branaugh, it feels miscalibrated.

Unfortunately, the film’s take on the mystery is no great shakes either. While a nice spine to anchor *Murder*’s mustache-driven cast interactions around, the movie suffers from the inevitable compression that comes when hundreds of pages of a novel are winnowed into a two hour production.

While a book, particularly a mystery book, gives the reader enough time to meet each character, get to know them a little while evaluation their possible motives and alibis, and then be appropriately surprised or reassured when the answer to “whodunit” is revealed, the film version of *Murder*, understandably, spends most of its early run introducing us to Poirot, and a few others. Then we get bare, drive-by introductions for the rest of the cast, only to dive right into whether they might have some grudge or connection to the deceased. It makes each twist have less impact than the last, as some shocking character reveal is only shocking if you feel like you know who a character was supposed to be when it’s shown who they really are.

Instead, *Murder* lands with a thud in the final act, with the grandest twist of them all that has the slightest bit of juice from its novelty as an answer to the “whodunit” that’s retained all these years later, but gets lost in the overwrought drama of a desired emotional reaction that the film never really earns. There’s good bits and pieces here – there couldn’t help but be with this many talented actors in the cast – but they’re never connected or distinctive enough to make the tapestry the film means to weave seem compelling.

Instead, *Murder on the Orient Express* is a perfectly fine film, something that amounts to some tasty-enough cinematic candy for the period piece set. It rarely holds your attention, but never causes you to turn away either, giving you just enough moments of levity or intrigue to stick around while never quite offering enough to draw you in. The closing moments of the film promise more adventures for the mustachioed detective, but if they come, let’s hope they manage to stay on track better than this one did.