Is this a good mystery? I wouldn’t know—it’s really not my genre. But I do like extraordinary characters, and in Hercule Poirot, as portrayed by Kenneth Branagh, you do have an iconic presence who really draws in the viewer. The portrayal comes across as that much fresher given that the story in this outing is a relatively untouched property, rather than the well-trodden paths of the Nile and the Orient Express. Add to those appealing elements some keen direction and skillful cinematography—the movie is a visual treat all the way through—and the result is a film that mostly satisfies. Again, I’m not a mystery fan, so I will confess that I grew a tad bored with the roundabout trip to an ultimately unwieldy explication...but that may just have been me watching the movie while being tired, too. As for the implied-by-the-title supernatural aspect of the story, the movie ultimately supplies one or two jolts, but overall it's a rather tame dose of the spooky. In sum, this is a finely-crafted movie for adults, with just enough touches of intrigue, chills, and interesting and exotic setting to lift the overall work into something worth the viewer's time.
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