(This review may contain spoilers).
I actually found this movie quite hard to watch – not because it wasn’t good, but because I grew so used to seeing David Suchet as Poirot. Even by the end, I couldn’t get used to Kenneth Branagh.
At the same time, this movie was quite entertaining to watch. It was good to see Poirot putting together clues and making connections with his ‘little grey cells’, even if I didn’t always follow his reasoning. For instance, there’d been little to no foreshadowing of Ratchett’s real identity before the murder occurred.
I did get somewhat confused with the sheer amount of characters that were on the train and I felt that the closed quarters could have been utilised a whole lot more than they were to generate a sense of claustrophobia in both the characters and the viewer. The camera angles shot from above just made it confusing and difficult to see any real details.
I did think it was good that Poirot had different ways of questioning people based on their personalities, but that could also have been utilised better – shown instead of referenced once by a character and then not brought up again.
I thought the actors did a good job of playing off each other. I did, however, keep forgetting what time period the movie was placed in. Apart from some throwaway racist lines, there wasn’t really all that much.
It was good to have revelations about the characters come out as Poirot interacted with them, but as everyone was hiding something, it just became a long game of waiting.
While everything did come together, I didn’t really feel satisfied by the end of the movie. I wouldn’t have said it really added anything to the franchise and just seemed to be about retelling the original movie. I don’t have any plans to watch this movie again.
Ink of Blood 