The Mystery of Whether you Should Watch This or Not
When a colorful cast of characters are huddled up on a several days trip on a train, something’s bound to happen. After the murder of the sketchiest man present occurs, it turns the trip into a mystery. Lucky for them, the “Greatest Detective” is aboard and ready to solve it.
***Warning: Spoilers***
This cast is stacked, but with messy storytelling, brings it to a screeching halt. I went in, not reading the book, excited for a famous mystery to be told with moving pictures. But with this stacked cast, it felt that it needed to flesh them all out, which caused us as an audience to juggle several stories. At some points, it felt that the conclusion of an interview/investigation just pops out of nowhere, leaving us to try to formulate how he got there.
Some of the cinematography did not work for me. For working on a cramped space most of the time, I can understand the challenges of telling an engaging story, but that diminished the impact of scenes. Following a kid rushing to gather eggs in a wide open city is instantly undermined by the long dolly shots, where fast and frantic editing would have been better. There were a lot of long takes that felt like they were there just to show how long people can act/film without cutting. This is a problem for me because it doesn’t carry meaning to the scene. Other than long takes, we get constant over-the-shoulder conversations. The monotonous shot choices in key conversations take away from the seriousness of the case. And let’s not even talk about the weird top-down angles that didn’t make sense at all.
The plot became predictable early on. Like I said, I didn’t read the book, so I’m not sure how things hashed out, but the investigations dropped too much information on us. The plot didn’t keep us guessing, especially as we inched closer to the end. The constant ties into an old case just kept roping in suspects left and right. When it came to the big twist, I even thought that the flashback reveal was just comical at one point. I couldn’t help but think of that SNL sketch that featured the Jason Derulo smash hit, “Watcha Say.”
I’m not sure whether I should be happy that I saw this without reading the book, or if I should have read the book and avoided the movie. It is definitely an intriguing mystery that predates a lot of the fun mysteries that we see in today’s films. But with messy storytelling, it’s hard to recommend this one.