Poirot Fails to Solve the Mystery of Starting a Franchise

When I came home after watching Kenneth Branagh's most recent directorial venture, 'Murder on the Orient Express', I told my dad that the film tried to tease a sequel in its final moments, to which he jokingly asked if it was just someone inviting him on a cruise down the river Nile, in reference to another famous story featuring the famed detective Hercule Poirot. I laughed, not just because it was a funny thought that the film would be so blatantly lazy when it has such talent behind it but also because that's exactly what happened. Sure, there have been plenty of films that have tacked on an awkward cliffhanger in a ham-fisted attempt to start a viable film franchise, it was happening even before that infamous Skeletor tease at the end of the 'Masters of the Universe' movie but it seemed that slowly this thoughtless tactic was phasing out. Hollywood was catching on to the fact that it wasn't working, they were realising they needed to just make a good thing on its own first and see how it went. That was until that fateful day in 2008 when Marvel Studios struck gold with 'Iron Man', a film that carried with it a franchise tease that actually worked and Hollywood went back to square one, not realising that the success of the MCU came from the fact that they made a good thing and not from their tacked on yet surprisingly clever post-credits scene. If your movie warrants a sequel your audience will let you know, you don't have to awkwardly throw out the suggestion. Star Wars didn't end with a brief cameo from Billy Dee Williams and the line, 'we may have won today but the Empire will strike back!" Surely the fact that the biggest franchise of all time started with a good, standalone movie should be enough to convince studios, producers, writers and directors to just stop forcing this sequel tease down our throats. Alas, this trope continues on. 2017 has had one of the worst versions of this already, in the form of 'The Mummy' in which they spend most of the movie setting up the Universal 'Dark Universe', which will probably never actually happen, and now this. When I saw the trailer for 'Murder on the Orient Express' I was intrigued, the style of the trailer and the terrible music choice at the end conveyed to me that this movie would be an emotionally gutted, lowest common denominator version of the classic tale made purely to appeal to the widest possible audience and get bums in seats. I then thought about everyone involved, the cast was great and Kenneth Branagh is a great filmmaker having made one of the best Marvel origin stories and a pretty darn good version of 'Cinderella', surely it's just the marketing that was bad. When the film started and the audience was treated to the end of Poirot's last investigation, I knew I was wrong, the trailer's tone fit the movie perfectly as, from the get go, the movie tries to turn Hercules Poirot into a superhero. The movie starts with Poirot in Jerusalem, where he makes a dramatic display out of revealing who stole a precious jewel from a sacred place, he then proceeds to knock the culprit out with his cane in what I can only assume was trying to be a slapstick moment of comedy. I knew then I was in for a bit of a cliched mess of a film. This was assured when we met Poirot's assistant, as played by Tom Bateman, who is awful, to put it bluntly. The man has no charisma or charm to make up for his lack of acting ability and every actor in the film is tasked with struggling through clunky, expositional dialogue that made me cringe no end. To the film's credit, parts of it were beautifully shot, the colour palette was absolutely fantastic and the talent of the ensemble cast is very impressive. Unfortunately the cast doesn't dazzle as it should due to the quality of acting on display. Josh Gad does amazingly well and almost saves this film with his performance but the rest of the cast fails to impress, it's almost as if these brilliant performers just forgot how to act during the filming of this movie. I was genuinely excited to see the performances that these idols of mine would produce and yet when I watched the film I witnessed 'Star Wars' star Daisy Ridley and Leslie Odom Jr, fresh off of his amazing role in 'Hamilton', become dull and wooden. Odom Jr. appeared to struggle to convey emotion through his bad but inoffensive accent as did Branagh with his Belgian. Michelle Pfeiffer and Willem Dafoe gave extremely forgettable performances and speaking of forgettable, there came a point in the film where I completely forgot Sergei Polunin's character was even on the train. This movie was bad and stunk of desperation for a new franchise to try and keep up with the superhero dominated box office. A word of advice to Branagh and the studio behind this film: if you want to compete with the superheroes then do something different and make a proper Poirot film instead of trying to make him the same as the superheroes. On a more positive note, this is the best performance I've seen Johnny Depp give in a long time, it's shame he wasn't in the movie for longer but a rating must be given and I should say that this goose most definitely does not have teeth.