Rating: **
Review Date: 1/1/24
Director: Michael Winner
Cast: Peter Ustinov, Lauren Bacall, Carrie Fisher, David Soul, Piper Laurie,
Jenny Seagrove
"Apparently, the Almighty doesn't like my arms, in spite of having made them."
Peter Ustinov's final outing as detective Hercule Poirot is a bit of a letdown, in what feels like a made-for-TV movie. The widow Emily Boynton (Piper Laurie) is a mean, sadistic, and unbearable old woman who everyone wants dead. When she ends up dying during a family trip to an archeological dig in Israel, Poirot finds himself with nearly a dozen suspects who all had a reason to kill her. While she certainly deserved to die, murder is still a crime and Poirot has a job to do. Unfortunately, the contrived circumstances and convenient coincidences strain credibility, but it's always fun to see Poirot's grand and theatrical reveal as he works the room and fits all of the puzzle pieces into place.
The film is a bit of a chore to sit through, and Dr. Sarah King (Jenny Seagrove) is the only pleasant character in the bunch. Piper Laurie does a superb job of being completely nasty and intolerable, while Lauren Bacall revels in her brassy and abrasive snobbery. Poirot isn't particularly engaging and Ustinov looks tired and bored. The rest of the actors are mediocre at best, but it's nice to see Carrie Fisher and David Soul in the cast, despite seeming completely out of place. The writing tends to be weak and the characters' actions and motivations are often baffling and hard to follow. The characters also fail to be interesting or endearing, which makes it even harder to watch.
As expected of the genre, the film deceives and misdirects the audience to keep them guessing, but what it chooses to show doesn't always make sense, which ends up confusing and insulting the viewer. The film itself is an unreliable narrator, it seems. (and luxury ocean liners are apparently teeming with cockroaches) The studio lighting has a garish soap opera look that betrays the film's budget, and the music is inappropriately campy and upbeat, as if to counter the characters' sour dispositions. Overall, it's an uneven production that's only marginally entertaining. The fact that there's no US home video release confirms its status as a lesser Agatha Christie adaptation.