Among this tight group is the world’s best known and loved Belgium crime-buster, Hercule Poirot, who was offered a seat on the Orient Express at the last minute after bumping into his friend Mr Bouc (Tom Bateman), the owner of the luxury coach.
It now falls on Poirot, played by Kenneth Branagh, to solve the mystery before the perpetrator strikes again.
Branagh does a splendid job with Poirot, capturing his idiosyncrasies in an endearing, not irritating way. The detective’s signature moustache is brandished in all its glory and Poirot’s sharp wit keeps audiences tickled throughout the film.
We are introduced to the passengers in stages, from the career gangster Samuel Ratchett (Johnny Depp) who has been receiving death threats aplenty, to governess Mary Debenham (Daisy Ridley), and Dr Arbuthnot (Leslie Odom, Jr), who are clearly more than mere strangers on a train.
There’s Hector MacQueen (Josh Gad), the young American working for the unscrupulous Ratchett, and a somewhat dried-up and bitter Princess Dragomiroff of Russia (Judi Dench) with her two adorable but terribly pampered pooches.
Also under the watchful eye of Poirot is an opportunistic American widow called Caroline Hubbard (Michelle Pfeiffer), who cuts quite a dramatic figure.
A sombre-looking Spanish missionary, Pilar Estravedos (Penelope Cruz) also falls under suspicion now as are a Hungarian count (Sergei Polunin) and his wife (Lucy Boynton), and German professor Gerhard Hardman (William Dafoe), who is labelled a racist very early in the film.
Now, as the train hurtles across Europe, an avalanche stops it in its tracks, forcing the murdered and those suspected of the dastardly act, to continue to live in close quarters until Poirot uses this precious time to dissect every morsel of information, and scrutinise very clue, to find who among the passengers had the motive and the means to kill.
Having arrived at the solution after interviews with every single suspect, the detective gathers everyone outside in a train tunnel as workmen frantically shovel away snow to clear the tracks. As furtive glances are exchanged, each passenger seems more guilty than the next until, in a flurry of drama and rising tension, Poirot lets fly his damning revelation.
Now, for the uninitiated, this revelation makes all the difference to the film. “What a fantastic ending,” one gasps! However, to those who have read Agatha Christie’s 1934 book of the same title or watched the Sidney Lumet movie that followed in 1974, the ending to this re-make obviously falls flat.
How excited can one get if one already knows the ending at the beginning? That in itself, robs the audience member of a large chunk of the film’s enjoyment.
It also, to a certain extent, begs the question as to why a re-make of this film was even attempted, when so much of the thrill of the film, lies in its spectacular ending.
However, millennials who haven’t either read or watched the original Murder on the Orient Express or who haven’t a clue as to who Christie was, will enjoy the movie thoroughly and get swept up by the intrigue of it all, just as the writer intended.
Judged by this re-make alone, Murder on the Orient Express is a thrilling movie, and Branagh shines in both his roles as Poirot and film director.
The cast, all top-billing names, each hold their own expertly, though Dench, Cruz and Dafoe are enjoyed for only short spurts in the movie – a case of too many suspects, too little time, no doubt. However, Depp as the slimy Ratchett has enough time on screen, to make the audience despise him early on in the film.
So in the final analysis, should one watch Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express? Yes, if only to watch your favourite characters in action once again and catch an old-fashioned whodunnit with good dialogue and great acting, minus the predictable car chases, superhuman stunts, annoying one-liners and silly sexual trysts that most crime films of today are made up of.
Murder on the Orient Express is distributed by 20th Century Fox and will open in cinemas on Nov 30. It is rated 13.