The Spooktacular Agatha Christie Adaptation A Haunting In Venice is an Intriguing Terror Tale But a Forgettable Mystery

Kenneth Branagh has a VERY silly mustache

When I put up the weekly poll for paid subscribers to determine which movie I will watch and write about I generally have a movie that I want to see more than the others and that I consequently hope will win. 

My reasons are intensely personal and also very silly. For example I REALLY wanted Nicolas Cage’s new movie The Retirement Plan to win the weekly poll because I’m such a massive Cage fan that I’ve devoted much of the past four years to watching and writing up all of his films for the Travolta/Cage podcast, the Travolta/Cage Project and eventually a book about John Travolta and Nicolas Cage’s life’s work. 

Will anyone want to buy a book like that? Christ I hope so! I’m not sure I can handle more failure. Seriously. Things have NOT been going well for me.

This week the choices were The Expendables 4, A Haunting in Venice and It Lives Inside. I was rooting for The Expendables 4 because I grew up in the 1980s and consequently am a sucker for a cheesy, Cannon-style action extravaganzas starring many of the action heroes I grew up loving. Except for Steven Seagal. FUCK that guy. You know how terrible of a person you need to be to not get cast in any of the Expendables movies despite being one of the top action stars of the 1990s? 

It didn’t matter to me that The Expendables 4 was getting terrible reviews and was supposed to be godawful. If anything, that made me more eager to see it. 

If you follow my career you know that I’m not too hung up on “quality” and “respectability” and “not being unspeakably abysmal.” 

In violent defiance of my wishes, and those of the Bad Movie Gods who I have spent my career serving, you instead voted for me to see A Haunting in Venice, a perfectly respectable-looking Agatha Christie adaptation with Kenneth Branagh directing and starring as extravagantly mustachioed master gumshoe Hercule Poirot. 

I am old enough to remember when Branagh was heralded as the new Olivier. He was a highbrow icon who would bring the works of William Shakespeare to the masses. 

Instead that fell to Amanda Bynes and the 2006 Twelfth Night adaptation She’s the Man. Branagh decided that prancing around in tights and spouting iambic pentameter was all well and good but that he had to get paid. 

So Branagh worked with artists many say are greater than Shakespeare, like Jon Peters, the producer of 1999’s Wild, Wild West. 

As a filmmaker Branagh leans towards deeply personal projects that speak to him as an artist and a man, like the comic book adaptation Thor and 2014’s Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, which allowed him to realize his lifelong dream of bringing the work of Tom Clancy to the big screen. 

Branagh also did a bunch of classy, award-winning shit during this time but to me he’ll always be the bad guy from Wild Wild West and the director of Thor and Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. 

On a similar note I suspect that Branagh decided to brush off his thickest French accent to play Agatha Christie’s famous creation because he enjoys the role and the writer but also because a studio paid him a large amount of money to do so. 

I am not a big fan of mysteries. I have nothing against them. They’re just not my cup of tea. So if given a choice between (I’m just spitballing here) a cheesy action movie that I know will be bad or a perfectly adequate mystery I will invariably choose the cheesy action movie. 

Y’all felt otherwise, however, so last night I saw A Haunting in Venice at the local theater. 

As the film begins Hercule Poirot is enjoying a richly deserved retirement. Or rather he would be enjoying a richly deserved retirement if only the public would leave him alone and stop trying to get him to solve mysteries. 

Mystery novelist Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey) convinces the grumpy genius and genius grump to go with her to a seance at the opulent palazzo of Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly) to contact her dead daughter run by medium Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh).

Poirot does not believe in the occult. He is a man of science and reason who does not go in for superstition or the supernatural. 

The legendary detective’s fervent belief that everything in this sick, sad world can be explained by science is sorely tested when a series of seemingly unexplainable events happen at the seance and afterwards. 

Are ghosts, malevolent spirits and possession to blame or is there a rational explanation for everything that has happened? 

I am not a fan of mysteries but I am deeply enamored of horror movies and all things horror, particularly during the spooky season. So while I was not excited about seeing a mystery I was psyched to see a mystery that was also a horror movie. 

A Haunting in Venice is and is not a horror movie. Branagh has said that it’s not a horror movie but rather a “psychological thriller” but nevertheless filmed the proceedings unmistakably like a terror tale/fright fable. 

The film takes place on the darkest and stormiest of dark and stormy nights, with a storm raging outside as well as inside. 

If I might engage in some light spoilers Yeoh is far and away the most compelling actor in the film. She is also one of the first to die and the movie never gets over her absence. 

Yeoh disappears into her role. The same cannot be said of Tina Fey. I don’t know whether this is my problem or hers but my stupid brain never accepted her as the character she’s playing rather than as Tina Fey or Liz Lemon. 

It didn’t matter that Fey, a famously witty writer, was playing a famously witty writer, not unlike her famous character Liz Lemon. It felt throughout like Fey was doing an old-timey mystery writer character in a Saturday Night Live sketch that inexplicably and unfortunately lasts one hundred and three minutes and cost sixty million dollars to make. 

A Haunting in Venice reminded me yet again why I love horror movies and do not care for mysteries. As an atmospheric mash-up of two seemingly disparate genres A Haunting in Venice has a certainly spooky appeal. 

As a mystery, however, this feels rote and unexceptional. I simply didn’t care whodunnit and the film lags in its third act when it should be building to a shattering climax. 

Branagh has fun chewing scenery as the most famous detective who isn’t Sherlock Holmes or Batman but even he seems a little worn out by the end. 

Dammit, people, why couldn’t you have voted for The Expendables 4? That was the only reasonable excuse to see a stupid fucking movie I nevertheless really want to see. 

Things should go a little smoother this weekend, as I really want you to vote for the new Paw Patrol movie, both because I want to see it with my eight year old son and because it’s the kind of terrible movie I very much enjoy eviscerating. 

Two and a Half Stars Out of Five