Murder on the Orient Express

This isn't any good.

It's too modernized.

Get it?

No, seriously, they would have been better off sticking to Christie's original source and making it more like the 1974 film starring Albert Finney. (Which is what my TV guide had listed in place of this atrocity.) This made-for-TV version is with Alfred Molina, who lacks energy and umph. No wonder. The material is rather dire and the film is a complete mess. Someone references O.J. Simpson. Please.

Don't see this.

See the 1974 version.

Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express contains one of her most ingenious plots. It is also easy to stage, as only one major locale is needed. The original movie played around this monotony and presented excellent characters. For those of us who have read and seen the great writer's books and adaptations, we are all familiar with the timeline of the plots, i.e. 1920's thru 1940's...The recent remake suffers extensively from the modernization of the events and the characters. It is almost disorienting to see Poirot using the internet, other characters talking about and utilising the most modern and recent devices etc. That just does not fit well and seems so illconceived. Fans of this genre to which I believe this movie was most directed at, are familiar with the original characters and timeline, and would surely be turned off by the changes.(To set the record straight, Orient Express stopped operating several decades ago, and people in Turkey do NOT wear arabic outfits.) As far as the narrative goes, the characters were not well developed, and acting was at best passable, except Leslie Caron, who in her brief spot walked away with the movie. My best humble advise would be to go and rent the original one, which served the writer perfectly...

Any new version of the classic Agatha Christie is almost certain to invite unfavourable comparisons with the 1974 cinema version in which Sidney Lumet directed a star studded cast in a lavish and expensive treatment of the book. This television movie is a less star studded affair and adds to its problems by setting the story in the present day ,complete with laptop computers and mobile phones ,thereby losing the period settings which are so essential a part of the writers continuing appeal. The plot remains the same -a passenger on board the famed train is killed and Hercule Poirot investigates and solves the mystery by the application of the "little gray cells" Alfred Molina does a fair job of Poirot and I would like to see him tackle the role in a better production ;while Leslie Caron and Peter Strauss are good in supporting roles. A pointless remake and I would advise going back to the 1974 picture if you want to see a movie of the book

It is Alfred Molina's great misfortune that, in portraying Hercule Poirot, he has been preceded by Peter Ustinov, Albert Finney, and David Suchet. Had this not been true, we might have been tempted to give his performance a higher rating than it is now possible to do.

The original novel by Agatha Christie (same title) is one of the greatest whodunits ever penned. For unknown reasons, Ustinov never did it. My guess is that, although his Poirot films were made after the timely death of the pernicious and much-despised Code, the prospect of a murderer getting away with the crime was still too daunting for Hollywood. Suchet has yet to make Orient, but then it was only last year ('07) that he finally did "Mrs. McGinty's Dead" (with, we hope, Ariadne Oliver). Suchet's voice is used for Poirot in the 2006 Orient Express video game.

So finally, in 2001 a TV version of Orient is made with Alfred Molina in the key role. Alas. Molina is a talented actor. His portrayal of Poirot, while not definitive nor even close, is passable – even pretty good in some ways. However, once we compare him with his predecessors (not to mention the literary original), the problems show up like fat, pendulous, juicy pimples (the kind we all loved to pop back in the day). We all know, for instance, that Poirot was fastidious to the point of school-marmish fussiness. Molina's Poirot is neat and that's about it. Molina's accent is a sort of generalized European, not the pointedly confrontational French that Poirot affected. Molina does use the catch-phrase "little grey cells", but he rattles them out because they're in the script, not because (as is the case) Poirot is obsessive about them. Indeed, Poirot's fundamentally obsessive character is de-emphasized to the point of vanishing. Molin'a Poirot seldom speaks of himself in the third person; Poirot does so rather a lot. His mustache is some short hair under his nose; Poirot's is a fashion statement and accessory that defines his dandified appearance. Molina doesn't wear gloves. Nor spats, but then the date of the mystery has been moved up to about the date the film was made. Anyone who by now believes I haven't made my case doesn't know Hercule.

While Suchet is the best Poirot overall, Ustinov bears away the palm for best actor. He inhabits the role so effectively that we become unconscious of his imposing height and bulk. Finney, who appears in the 1974 Orient, lacks for little in the Poirotishness of his portrayal. This is a competition that Molina simply can't win.

The plot of the 2001 film is, incidentally, pretty much the same as that of the novel and the 1974 film. Poirot is traveling from Istanbul on the famous Orient Express. He shares the first class car with a diverse set of individuals. One of them, a highly unpleasant person (Ratchett) is stabbed to death in the dead of night. There are plenty of clues … in fact, as Finney's Poirot observes and Molina's does not, there are too many of them. The train is stalled in its journey (snow slide in 1974, rock slide in 2001) and the railway's CEO commissions Poirot to find the killer. Through patient questioning and separating false clues from real ones, Poirot does so … twice. If you don't actually know the plot already, your cultural deprivation is truly unfortunate.

The problem with the 2001 production, however, runs deeper than merely the star. It's virtually the whole cast and what the update in time has done to their roles. The update from 1935 to c.2001 was apparently made because the producers figured that education has been so inadequate recently that viewers would never figure out what a White Russian (Princess Dragomirov) is, nor understand references to the Lindburgh kidnapping, nor fail to be puzzled by people going to Iraq for actual constructive purposes (archaeology), nor … well, you get the gist.

The result is that we have characters who are updated but far less interesting. As for the participating actors: recall that in 1974 we get Martin Balsam, Richard Widmark, Wendy Hiller, Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Sean Connery, Michael York, Vanessa Redgrave, Anthony Perkins, John Gielgud, … well, again you get the gist. Want a cast list of the 2001 film? Well, there's Leslie Caron, and Who? …and Whom? …and What? …and Which? …and …and …and … well, and a group of actors, most of whom are still working. They appear primarily in small roles in TV series episodes and in fairly little-known films. The upshot is that we get OK performances of a fairly uninspired script, and that's about it. The exception is from the one fine actor in the group, Leslie Caron. That's the upside. The downside is that her performance is deeply informed by that of Wendy Hiller as Princess Dragomirov. In this film the character becomes Señora Alvarado, the widow of a fairly nasty Latin American dictator. The problem here is that the character has way more social standing than would someone coming from such a sleazy background. She is in fact treated as the royalty Dragomirov was. That is, the character doesn't really compute … in order to keep character relationships as they were before the rewrite, Alvarado had to be accorded deference even Eva Peron didn't get in exile. Still, Caron manages to convince us of her bona fides. As I said, she's good.

The cold, hard fact is that there are quite a few things on TV that are better than this remake. That's something we can't say about the 1974 original. The Poirot of the remake, Alfred Molina, is a pretty good actor – but for whatever reason he has seriously misconceived the part he plays and as Poirot he winds up in 4th place in a field of 4. The picture, alas, winds up in about 9th place in a field of 2.

This TV movie was clearly meant to be the pilot for a US version of David Suchet's classic UK Poirot show.

Hulking Alfred Molina joyously replaces Suchet here and that's where the hilarity begins. Poirot is physically a small man, and that's one of the key points of his character - a completely unassuming man with larger than life intellect. Molina is not bad as Poirot but looks nothing like him. Even Albert Finney, who played Poirot in the first and best adaptation of the Orient Express story in the 1974 theatrical film, and is also a pretty big man, had to pretend to be tinier than he is to sell himself as Poirot better.

Other things that make Poirot Poirot like his trademark mustache, love of Belgium and asexuality are also gone. Molina's mustache is more of a tribute to Poirot's than an actual eccentrically unique facial hair. He has a hot foreign girlfriend now (no joke), and ss for his amusing patriotic bravado (he's Belgian, not French, you see) you won't find it here, other than as a throwaway line spoken by another character.

However, despite all of this, Melina actually really is one of the rare good things about this adaptation. The TV cast of characters who play his suspects range, on the other hand, from forgettable to passable, but they aren't the worst thing about this movie either. No, the worst thing about this film is the attempt to modernize the story by setting it in present day IT savvy world, which (un)intentionally brings in so many plot and logic holes that you can build a tunnel out of them. This had to be done carefully and thoughtfully but it wasn't. It was done bluntly and carelessly. As a result there are so many ridiculous and (un)intentionally hilarious moments, and they aren't even all related to the fetishistic use of technology in the movie.

For instance, Poirot touches every piece of evidence with his bare hands because he's sure "that the killer didn't leave any fingerprints" on them. The police of any country would have immediately arrested him on the spot just for this. Maybe in 1934, when the book and almost all other adaptations of the story are set, they actually could have gotten away with this (although in most adaptations, Poirot actually uses a handkerchief to hold and inspect evidence, never his bare hands), but in 2001, with DNA evidence and fingerprints technology being a crucial part of any serious investigation, what Poirot does here is the dictionary definition of the term 'contaminating the crime scene'. Also, the murder plan as is doesn't really work in modern times either because of this, since any proper forensic investigation of the dead man's cabin would have easily uncovered inconsistencies in the killer's story.

Another silly thing about the movie is that it's not set in winter. It's actually set in what appears to be autumn and the train doesn't end up being snowed in, but a cave in causes the train to stop. The fact that they are not really stranded in the middle of nowhere, and that the passengers could easily simply leave the train, walk around the pile of rocks on the tracks and get on another train, possibly the one that brought the workers to clear the road, which could then take them to their destination, comes to no one's mind at any point.

Finally, the way they use technology in the movie may be the most blunt way of doing this in a mystery ever. You see, Poirot simply googles the passengers to try and uncover the culprit. It is as stupidly funny as it sounds. Also, some of the suspects are now a software engineer, a fitness instructor and the widow of a deposed and killed South American dictator!

And then there's the hilarious happy-go-lucky epilogue that completely ruins any dramatic effect that the mostly fateful ending may have had on the audience. Seriously, this epilogue feels like the script originally truly was suppose to be for a parody.

The odd thing about all this is that the movie does actually have some fan service and in-joke bits. For instance, the fitness instructor is a fan of Poirot's work and actually references some of his old cases from the books. So, whoever wrote this mess clearly did read Poirot's books.

In conclusion, watch the 1974 version for the full dramatic and emotional effect of this ingenious story (it's no false praise to say that this Agatha Christie tale is one of the most uniquely original crime mysteries ever written), and only then see this US TV version, especially if you're looking to have a good laugh (this is genuinely a so-bad-it's-good movie, and often (un)intentionally funnier than most comedies) or simply enjoy Molina as an actor (he really could have had a good Poirot run on TV, like the equally hulky Peter Ustinov before him in the 1980's, and it's truly sad that this inept adaptation had to be the pilot for this project and immediately and effectively kill off any chance for a further Molina Poirot series) or you simply wish to see every Murder on the Orient Express adaptation out there (the plot itself is mostly the same as the one in the book, so you should get at least something out of it then).

As an (un)intentional comedy and because of Molina, I give it a 6 (although, if judged realistically for what it's meant to be, it's closer to a 3 or a 4).