Rating of
1/4
How To Murder Agatha Christie!
Filmhaus - wrote on 04/15/21
If you love Agatha Christie (and I do), this is her best-selling mystery of all time!
If you're talking location, it's set in pre-revolution Iran in the most breath-taking, opulent hotel imaginable for 1975!
And this cast; talk about star-studded! Music by a well-known giallo composer in the Ennio Morricone style!
As a director, how, how, how could you mess this up?
...
The answer is you spend your budget on locale and cast, and skimp on boom microphones and an editor.
For example, there are whole scenes where you have to max the volume out on your TV just to make out what folks are saying. And it sounds like it's being recorded through an old can. The credits say they re-dubbed at some point, but good chunks of the script are still unrecognizable. (Especially Gert Frobe, who needs no help being unintelligible).
It's like they only had one mike so they put it close to the person with the most dialogue and everyone else just has to project. AAARGH!
I know movies based on stage plays have long shots to show off the cast, but the camera in this film is almost inert. It's like they got permission to shoot in the hotel only if they did establishing location shots every 10 minutes.
Couple that with minimal editing, and the pacing becomes a complete slog, where murders that should be suspenseful are incredibly boring. AAAAAAAARRRGGGHHH!
They must have shown the dailies to the cast, because they all look bored with the material.
Adding insult to injury, the soundtrack attempts to compensate for these shortcomings by going off the rails with intensity at odd moments in a desperate attempt to raise the emotional stakes of the film.
The whole experience is akin to taking Kobe beef and boiling it bland, putting it on a stale corn shell, and dumping taco spice straight from the packet on every bite.
Oofta, what a stinker! AAAAAAAAAAARRGAKK** (Dies from broken heart)
