Murder on the Orient Express Film Review

Director: Carl Schenkel
Year: 2001
Rating: 5.0

Poirot in Love. It is a wonderful thing to see the Belgian detective enthralled with a female and clearly sexually attracted to her. I usually think of the detective as a poached egg head with a massive brain on spindly legs. In one of the books, he spoke of a long-lost love but I doubt this is the woman. This one is very sexy, desires Poirot's body and is a notorious thief. He understands that this can not be, so instead he hops on the Orient Express to get home to London and no doubt his good friend Hastings. This was a TV production, some 27-years after the classic 1974 version and 16 years before the more recent film. There was also the David Suchet version in his long-running TV series. By now I expect everyone that has any desire to ever see a film version of the book has done so but I will avoid spoilers. Christie was a very clever writer and kept readers guessing for years. I think my batting average is fairly good but admittedly that is by luck or picking the least likely suspect. Her book in which the narrator turns out to be the killer is a classic and so is this one in a different way. It has been so long ago since I read this that I have no recollection whether I guessed right but highly unlikely.

It is brought into the modern day with cell phones, computers, software developers and an exercise guru telling Poirot that a few months of working out and he will look like Brad Pitt in Fight Club. A little off putting but not a big deal. Poirot is played by Alfred Molina and other than a moustache has no resemblance to the Poirot of the books at all. But he makes a decent Poirot though not really trying in any way to capture him other than the accent. Less brusque than Finney in the first one and less aggressive than Branaugh in the third version. He is famous to all the passengers having seen him on TV and he uses the computer to help solve the case which felt like cheating. Poirot needless to say never relied on technology - just his little gray cells.

The denouement which is always the money shot in these films is well done as he explains how it was done and who the killer is. This doesn't have the big star-studded cast that the other two had but we still get Meredith Baxter, Leslie Caron and Peter Strauss as the man most likely to be murdered. Directed by Carl Schenkel and coming in at 100 minutes. From a comment that Poirot makes at the end, I think there was hope that there would be more Poirot films but it never happened. Wikipedia says "Burt Reynolds, Judi Dench, Lauren Bacall, Claire Bloom, Charlotte Rampling, and Sophia Loren were all originally believed to have been cast in the film". That would have been something.