Murder on the Orient Express takes forever to get started and far too long to get to its corpse. It’s awfully turgid, especially considering this is based on a breezy Agatha Christie whodunit. Among the legendary ensemble cast, only a few of them pop off the screen with an air of devilish fun: Lauren Bacall, Vanessa Redgrave, and Anthony Perkins, the latter of whom nervously riffs on his mother issues from Psycho. Sadly, this list not only excludes wasted cast members Ingrid Bergman and Sean Connery, but also Albert Finney as famed Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. I can’t even pinpoint what’s off about Finney’s performance because it spins in so many strange directions (and that’s not even counting the accent work). As for director Sydney Lumet, he had made his fair share of close-quarters dramas before this, many of them based on plays, so you would think that he would have been adept at making inventive use of the confined setting. But aside from an intriguing single take near the end and a camera push into a face here and there, this is mostly comprised of cramped, medium two shots. The mystery itself, meanwhile, seems to be designed so that no one would have any chance of figuring it out. When the plot is this much of a lark, it’s in need of far lighter execution than this.
(9/22/2024)
