A Haunting in Venice

No-one would deny that Kenneth Branagh is a talented man and, in the right role, is certainly a fine actor but he's no Olivier and he's certainly no Orson Welles but he seems to have the ego of both. He gave us a fine "Henry V" and then an elephantine, full-length "Hamlet" that almost put me off Shakespeare for life. Now it seems he's put the Bard to bed and decided that he's the best man to take on the mantle of Hercule Poirot but I forgot to mention that he's also no Ustinov, Finney or David Suchet. His remakes of "Murder on the Orient Express" and "Death on the Nile" were both well below par and now he's turned his attention to an Agatha Christie novel not previously filmed. "A Haunting in Venice" is his version of "Hallowe'en Party" and it's just as tawdry as the others. To make matters worse this one lacks the star power we've become accustomed to in movies of this kind. Yes, there's last year's Best Actress Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh as a medium but basically that's it. As for the rest there's Jamie Dornan acting, or perhaps not 'acting', like he would rather be home in Belfast while his "Belfast" son, Jude Hill, is once again cast as his son. Elsewhere Tina Fey, Kelly Reilly, Camille Cotton, Kyle Allen and a few other less than famous faces mug their way through as various suspects. The setting is a 'haunted' mansion in Venice, there's been a murder and once again we are back in a stationary Orient Express as Branagh locks everyone in until he's solved the case. A disaster that should never have seen the light of day.

By 1930, Agatha Christie was fed up of the highly storied, but by-then "insufferable" Hercule Poirot. Yet her audience clamoured for more, prompting a reluctant Christie to churn out more of Poirot's cerebral, holmesian outings. It would seem history has repeated itself, people still want Poirot; but what we really need is something completely new from the drawing board. Christie would (probably) grimace to think that Poirot is getting a "Poirotverse" for-profit film series quarter way into the 21st century. Maybe the hunky, eccentric Benoit Blanc is a better sleuth-in-vogue or, dare one say, give the limelight to a fresh faced, budding whodunnit author. Instead, Branagh is eagerly sinking his teeth into what looks like a long dreary commercial march through 33 novels and 51 short stories of source material. This film sets out to combine the whodunnit with the horror genre and misses the mark on both. The meticulous, verbose, people-focused nature of the Christie-style whodunnit struggles to pair well with the timely, atmospheric build-ups of horror. Both needed time to deliver their respective punchlines. Neither had the scope to do it, and the waters became quickly muddied. The musical score (snore) is notably absent; sometimes using gaps of silence can be eerie and build tension, but here it's so overdone that the effect falls flat. The Dutch angle is used excessively and jarringly, and the film's direction just feels overall disjointed as Branagh both acts and directs. The screenplay is lifeless, the setting is dark and lifeless, the plot's culmination is lifeless. No joie de vivre, no buoyancy. One highlight would be Michelle Yeoh. If you're a Christie fan or devotee, you'll likely be pleased just seeing a depiction of Poirot on-screen, I'm sure. But for most people, I'd imagine this may disappoint.

Whereas the last two Branagh Agatha Christie adaptations were movies I sort of liked at first and started to realise were "meh" over time, this latest entry is one that I recognised as mediocre upon first viewing. Granted, it was really refreshing to see that this time, the filmmakers clearly put effort into the locations and production design. The film looks authentic and gorgeous, as opposed to its predecessors that were over reliant on unnecessary CGI backgrounds. The story does have some interesting ideas and compelling character interactions, but they unfortunately take a back seat half the time. For the other half, we get a lot of weak attempts at horror and red herring plot points that really do amount to nothing. I don't know what happened with the performances, but half of them are pretty great and the others are...well, awful. The actors clearly didn't agree on what kind of movie they were in, with some thinking it ought to be straight drama and others thinking they should play it corny. Like the previous films, this is a middling whodunnit, with all the rote machinations you expect from the genre, nothing shocking, nothing gripping, but nothing so bad as to tank the experience. It's the definition of mediocre.