The ABC Murders

I wish I could give it a negative rating. I forced myself to watch the whole thing. I kept waiting for it to improve. It didn't. It was depressing, both in tone and visually. I had to keep turning up the brightness on my phone just to have a clue to what had been filmed. After I pushed myself through it, I had to watch the 1992 version to cleanse my palate. I will also search my bookshelves for the book and really get back into the story. Agatha Christie was a genius. I've read all of her books. If this had been my first introduction to Poirot, I would never had read any more.

OK here's my problem with this series. First it is an excellent mystery but they should not have made that an Agatha Christie mystery. The backstory of Hercule Poirot is a complete fabrication. The actor does an excellent job portraying the role given him. The problem is it is a complete variance with the true Agatha Christie character.

Firstly this is certainly mostly watchable.

Secondly I guess I will be downvoted by some since this is likely an adaption that will create a divide between people who love it or hate it, or at least those who like it a lot or not at all, and I am in the middle.

In short some of the lower reviews are because this is great material, and the lead is a great actor, and yet this is a just a passable say a "fair to good" or what we stateside would call a "C+" to "B-"

Really does Christie portray the police so badly? (Correct Answer: No.) Would she have so many anachronistic behaviors and character attributes? No. Would she have native Francophone Belgian Poirot speak lousy French? No and Malkovich has impeccable French and seems to have been directed to speak French badly.

It isn't so much that that the series is terrible, it isn't. It is a) expectations should be high and the end product is mediocre, and b) one senses an intentional distancing from the source material -- which is often ok, but in this case the distancing does not work. This adaption doesn't just have condensations of the material -- it has added quirks and elements that not only are not in the Christie story, but detract from it. They create a different Poirot. Not different as in Suchet vs Malkovich portrayals, but the director/screenwriter vs Christie. EG, the bizarre overlay of immigration themes/controversy is a pointless attempt to score points and doesn't belong in this story. Adding a grittiness, and a literal darkness is not needed either. It seems a fashionable trope now, but there is no need when the original material already has its own texture that the adaptor obfuscates or fundamentally distracts from with their own vision. It is over the top.

Look I am all for adapting major literary/cultural archetypes, even subverting them -- in what they do and what the moral tale is. It is perfectly OK to tell two completely different morals with Prometheus, Daedalus or Electra and Orestes. Byron can subvert Mill on the former. Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Graves and Williams can use the latter to very different conclusions. But you don't just take a relatively contemporary character, created by another artist and change their characteristics to the point where they are unrecognizable and their actions are not credible.

Again, it s a C+ to B-, bring on the downvotes if you must. Oh and turn up the brightness on your screen, for some reason the adaptors think making everything actually dark equals a figurative darkness.

Thanks to David Suchet, people have a specific ideal for Hercule Poirot. He must be arrogant and suave. He must be calm and unruffled, like a deaf partridge. And he must be above all of the petty little squabbles around him. Because he is Poirot.

To be fair, this is also the Hercule Poirot that Agatha Christie designed.

But this is not the Hercule Poirot that Sarah Phelps wrote. If she had gotten the character of Poirot right, I could have overlooked the unfortunate hyper-sexuality, but she didn't, she got him wrong. There has never been a more depressed, morose, or tragic incarnation of Poirot than the one in this miniseries. Now, I could blame John Malkovich, but he did not write the screenplay. Therefore, not his fault. It's not his fault that Sarah Phelps decided to rewrite Poirot's history and turn him into a decades old liar. That offended me the most. The very idea of Poirot lying about his history is even more preposterous than the fabricated background she created for him.

So no. Alas, no. If she'd gotten Poirot right, like I said, the other millstones could have been overlooked and I might have rated a 7 or 8. But when the screenplay writer shows no respect for the origins of a literary character and its creator, that's when I get off the boat.

If you do not know anything about Poirot and Agatha Christie this is enjoyable. But if you are a purist you will be disappointed and maybe even angry.