Murder on the Orient Express

For some odd reason whenever I’m hanging out with my female friends, I always get overly protective of them. It’s nothing creepy or anything like that, it’s just that I feel the need to make sure that some tall jerk doesn’t stand in front of them at a show or that they text me when they get home to make sure the Uber driver didn’t murder and stash them on the side of the road after taking their innocence and their loose change. But in addition to that, I even do dumb things like hunt down loose cigarettes for them; all of which occurred this past weekend when my nerdy friend couldn’t find anyone to bum a smoke off of. So me being me, I went out on a quest to find one of these filthy things even though I hate cigarettes and normally the people that smoke them. And when I finally did find one, the guys I bummed it off of thought it was for me and even lit it while I stood there. And I, for whatever reason, was too embarrassed to tell them that it wasn’t for me, so I sat there puffing on it like it was a blunt. Naturally that drew a few weird looks as I’ve only smoked weed like twice in my life and that was centuries ago, so I’m sure that I was even doing that wrong.

And it was in this moment that I started reflecting on all of the wack stuff that I had done in my life to get to this point; like hallucinating after once eating a pot brownie or hating on Missy Elliott’s music for about a two week period in the early 2000’s. But what may have topped it all was reading all of those Agatha Christie novels as a kid. You see, I grew up in a terrible small town and I was a bit of an outsider, so I’d watch a lot of murder mysteries with my mom, you know, stuff like Matlock and Murder She Wrote, just to pass the time. And my mom knew that whenever I went to the library I’d always come home with a mystery novel, so she tried to turn me on to Agatha Christie to help us find even more of a common ground. Well, even as a kid I recognized the fact that her books catered to middle aged women, so to me they were pretty lame but it still beat listening to country music or stealing my father’s dip tobacco to give to my soon to be toothless girlfriend.

But for whatever reason, I forgot about all of this whenever I went to see Kenneth Branagh’s version of Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. Now I will give him credit for staying true to the overall feel and tone of her novel but those books were meant for a different time, not for us twisted freaks of today. Today we want to see weird things like people’s mouths being sewn to someone else’s anus (The Human Centipede) or watch a preteen mow down flesh eating zombies with a shotgun; none of which appeared in this film. This film looked and felt more like a live action Disney cartoon with its almost dreamy backdrop and looney characters who all felt as though they were channeling the evil hyenas from The Lion King. Murder mysteries are supposed to make you feel suspense and even a sense of wonder, not make you feel as though a song and dance number is on the horizon.

Well if you don’t know the story, Orient Express places its focus on the brilliant mind of Inspector Hercule Poirot, basically a lamer version of the Sherlock Holmes we all know and love today. He has a hipster mustache and cracks lame jokes while drinking tea and eating hard boiled eggs. But Poirot can also spot out the evil perpetrator in any given situation faster than any man alive. And it’s because of this that he’s put in a sticky situation while on a train ride to a much needed vacation. Someone has been mysteriously murdered on this train, so naturally the train’s senior conductor turns to him to help find the culprit. And under normal circumstances, Poirot would be able to get to the bottom of this within a few minutes but the person who was murdered had quite a few enemies and everyone on the train is seemingly a suspect. Again, going back to my point about the evil hyenas. Will Poitrot finally be outsmarted or will his talents rise to the occasion yet again?

Now it’s not that this movie is bad, it’s just that it’s not any good either. It is kind of fun to see Poirot match wits with each suspect and eventually put clues together as he gets closer to catching the culprit but there are far too many instances where he makes some pretty miraculous leaps when discovering the truth about someone. And he does so in such a hammy manner that I kept waiting for some fat guy in a three piece suit to stand up and yell "The butler did it!" Sadly that never happened but trust me when I say there was plenty of overacting to help make up for it (see Michelle Pfeiffer). In the end, I couldn’t wait for this film to be over so I could go home and watch some porn to put a little balance in my life but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth watching. If you’re bored on a weekday night, I’d say it’s worth a watch but I do have to give a rating of pretty WEAK!