John Malkovich is doing something very different with Hercule Poirot in the latest Agatha Christie TV adaptation, The ABC Murders, and he knows it. As Malkovich told Decider’s Joel Keller, he didn’t bring any of Poirot’s fussiness to his performance. He ditched the thick Belgian accent and even refused to sport the trademark mustache. He also didn’t really read any Christie to prepare. So the performance is the anti-Poirot Poirot, and in Malkovich’s own words, “Of course some people are going to not like that. And perfectly, understandably so.” I regret to inform Mr. Malkovich that I am one of those people. I really couldn’t stand The ABC Murders. The show is a dour interpretation of Christie’s novel, full of death, decay, and a sense of paranoia. But not in a fun murder mystery kind of way. You know, the drunk in an evening dress solving a murder at a party kind. Still what makes The ABC Murders close to unwatchable for me is Malkovich’s performance. I found it to be utterly befuddling. It’s not just that Malkovich doesn’t have any of Poirot’s famous tics, but he also mumbles and stumbles his way through the story, barely holding on to whatever accent he thinks he’s doing. There’s something exhausting about his Poirot, who seems more interested in his own mid-life crisis than the thrill of solving a murder mystery. In a way, Malkovich — who is a very good actor capable of delivering a great performance — winds up murdering Poirot in The ABC Murders. Hercule Poirot first appeared in print in 1920, and his “death” was marked by an obituary in The New York Times. He appears in 33 books, over 50 short stories, and has seeped into the public consciousness thanks to countless film and TV adaptations. David Suchet’s version of the character might be the most popular, at least since Suchet played the part on TV for almost 25 years. Albert Finney received an Oscar nomination for his performance in 1974’s Murder on the Orient Express, and Sir Kenneth Branagh is currently working on a big screen follow up to his lavish 3D version of that same story. These Poirots all hew closer to the character that Christie imagined. He’s meticulous, obsessive, and more than a little egotistical. Malkovich’s Poirot doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Christie, however. Something he seemed proud of when he talked to Keller. That’s fine, I suppose, but then why go to the bother of adapting Christie in the first place? Create a new detective and put him at the center of a new story. The ABC Murders seems to just be cashing in on the name-recognition of Christie, without bothering with her actual tone, voice, or writing. Perhaps the greatest mystery of all time might be trying to unravel why anyone thought casting Malkovich as Hercule Poirot was a good idea. It’s one of the worst bits of miscasting I can think of, and yet, it feels perfectly normal for 2019. It’s off-kilter, maddening, and full of misplaced vanity. Watch The ABC Murders on Prime Video<doc-sep>Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders comes to life in a new limited series adaptation starring John Malkovich as the beloved Hercule Poirot. Debuting exclusively on Amazon Prime Video Friday, February 1, the three-part mystery is set in 1933 and follows Poirot as he attempts to uncover the identity of a killer that goes by the alias of “ABC.” As Poirot follows the murderer’s path along the British railway network, he’ll be thwarted at every turn. TV Insider has your first look at the series with an exclusive sneak peek at a heated exchange between Malkovich’s Poirot and Inspector Crome, played by Harry Potter‘s Rupert Grint, in which the witty detective’s identity is questioned. You see, Poirot’s methods for learning the truth are considered less-than-helpful by his fellow investigators. And Crome doesn’t trust the detective’s foggy past, pointing out that there’s no record of Poirot’s previous crime-solving history. Is Poirot lying or is there a reason for this mystery? Watch the clip below to decide for yourself and don’t miss The ABC Murders on Amazon Prime Video. The ABC Murders, Streaming, Prime Video<doc-sep>There is a mystery at the heart of the new “The ABC Murders.” And not just the one about serial killers in merry old Depression-era England. Who, exactly, was the fastidious, mustachioed Hercule Poirot? There is a solution to that question (and a spoiler below) in the adaptation that recently materialized on Amazon Prime and stars an unlikely John Malkovich as Agatha Christie’s persnickety Belgian sleuth. It comes courtesy of a BBC team that included Sarah Phelps, the writer of such Christie adaptations as “Ordeal by Innocence,” “And Then There Were None” and “Witness for the Prosecution,” as well as 50-odd episodes of “EastEnders” and last year’s “The White Princess.” Taking on Poirot means taking on a character who has been played by everyone from Orson Welles to Albert Finney to Peter Ustinov to David Suchet. He has been ubiquitous, and caricatured, seemingly forever. “Even Christie got sick of him,” Ms. Phelps said in an interview with America. “He’d become a series of tics and affectations.” But even a lot of devoted fans would have to confess to not being quite encyclopedic on Poirot. Taking on Poirot means taking on a character who has been played by everyone from Orson Welles to Albert Finney to Peter Ustinov to David Suchet. “Neither am I,” said Ms. Phelps. “I’ll be really honest: Till I started working on them, I’d never read a Christie. I thought, ‘Oh they’re going to be really safe, really cozy,’ which is how Christie’s been sold in the U.K.—murder as cozy entertainment. But it shocked me! It was like the Greeks, like Aeschylus, really remorseless, really savage; and I really enjoyed it.” At the same time, she wanted to get at who Poirot was, besides (as Christie implied) a devout Catholic, a refugee from 1914 Belgium and a walking catalogue of mannerisms and trademark haberdashery. Why, she wanted to know, was he so relentless in his pursuit of the guilty? Why did he “honor the body on the floor,” and so compulsively move from one murder to the next, through 33 novels and dozens of short stories? There are, she said, inconsistencies in the backstory. “Some people got mad at me,” Ms. Phelps said. “They said, ‘He was the head of the Belgian police!’ and I said, ‘Yes, well, the thing is...he’s a refugee. And refugees are civilians. In an invasion by a foreign power, the police aren’t going to have civilian status. I think he’s been lying.” Look at his silhouette, she said, the way he wears his clothes. “That brimmed homburg, that hard, unfashionable collar he always wears under his chin; that particular gray overcoat, the way it drapes his body, the watch chain across his chest,,,, “And I kept thinking, ‘You know what? I think that brimmed hat is a saturno. And that gray overcoat is his soutane. I think that watch chain is a rosary. And that hard collar that he habitually wears—turn it around. What is it?” More evidence: “In some of the books,” Phelps said, “he refers to himself as Papa Poirot. He habitually addresses groups of adults as mes enfants. I thought, well, who does that? A man who addresses groups of adults as ‘my children’ has been addressed himself as ‘father.’ So I said, ‘I know what you are and I know why you lied.’” In brief flashbacks that appear in each of the three installments of “ABC Murders,” Poirot re-experiences his final days in Belgium, as a country priest who is beaten unconscious while his church full of parishioners is set ablaze by invading German troops. Only in the last moments of the series is Poirot’s tragedy revealed, though there are clues along the way—the prie-dieu he keeps in his bedroom, for instance, along with a Marian shrine. Ms. Phelps said she is a big fan of Malkovich’s interpretation, which was a 180-degree “spin on the character.” “The denouement, of course, was exciting for him,” she said. “That anguishing little aspect of Poirot not having been enough to save his flock, and not being able to forgive himself, and being compelled to seek justice. It is a deep, deep dive into what it meant to be Hercule Poirot, a refugee who made his home in England, who was celebrated and famous but who I imagined as having been the most humble of things. And a good one. And brave.”<doc-sep>Hercule Poirot is a flexible little fellow. He can be dapper and twinkling, as David Suchet played him for 24 years on television. He can be vigorously obsessive-compulsive, as Kenneth Branagh played him in “Murder on the Orient Express” in 2017. And as it turns out, he can also be a depressed, guilt-ridden loner, as John Malkovich is forced to play him in “The ABC Murders,” a three-part mini-series now available on Amazon Prime Video. The British screenwriter Sarah Phelps has been taking liberties with Agatha Christie’s mystery tales, on behalf of the Christie estate and the BBC, for a while now — “ABC Murders,” based on the 1936 novel of the same name, is the fourth mini-series she’s adapted from the books. Her method is extreme makeover, redoing Christie’s plots and reshaping her sensibility in a lurid and ominous fashion that, combined with top-flight casts, produced entertaining results with “And Then There Were None” and “Ordeal by Innocence.” “The ABC Murders” is Phelps’s most thorough teardown yet, and this time she’s so suffocatingly revisionist that what’s left isn’t really Christie at all. The insistence on making everything grimmer and grosser is almost comically complete.<doc-sep>
In 'The ABC Murders,' John Malkovich Plays An Older, More Vulnerable Poirot Enlarge this image toggle caption Gareth Gattrell /Amazon Prime Video Gareth Gattrell /Amazon Prime Video Next year will mark the 100th anniversary of the publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Agatha Christie's first novel featuring fictional detective Hercule Poirot. An acutely observant crime-solver in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes, Poirot has since been played on screen by such actors as Albert Finney, Peter Ustinov and, most famously, David Suchet, who starred in Poirot, a lengthy series presented in the U.S. by PBS. Though the series with Suchet ended in 2014, Poirot now lives again, in The ABC Murders, a three-part British production that's been imported by Amazon Prime Video. The new miniseries is based upon The A.B.C. Murders, the 13th novel in Christie's series of books featuring Poirot. The script for The ABC Murders was adapted by Sarah Phelps, whose writing and production credits in the U.K. in the last few years alone include the classy TV adaptations of Christie's And Then There Were None, The Witness for the Prosecution and Ordeal by Innocence. And the series introduces, as Christie's famously imperious Belgian detective, an American actor: John Malkovich. The ABC Murders is set, and was originally written, between the two World Wars. It's 1933 in England, where posters proclaim such anti-immigrant sentiments as, "We must stem the alien tide." Poirot, an immigrant himself, had come to England and succeeded admirably as a detective. But the man we meet now is basically retired, and long past his prime. The new police inspectors don't respect him, much less consult him. He dyes his beard to look younger, a temporary affectation that only makes him seem more outdated and desperate. But when someone begins taunting him with typewritten letters, posted daily from different cities and threatening a series of random murders of alphabetically chosen victims, Poirot is the first to take the letters seriously — letters which make it clear that the killer knows the detective well, down to his newly blackened beard. Always the smartest guy in the room, Poirot is the first to recognize when the police arrest the wrong man — pointing out the error of their ways even as Detective Bunce, played by Shane Attwooll, is taking the suspect into custody. Poirot enumerates all the reasons why the man couldn't have committed the crime — but Bunce is adamant, telling Poirot with a sneer, "Case closed." The case is far from closed, of course. It's just getting started, as victims with alliterative names — begin piling up in various cities. The clues lead, eventually, to railway stations in the country's ABC Railway Guide — but also connect to the detective's past. Phelps adapts this particular mystery novel taking a few liberties, and all of them are commendable. The hero is more vulnerable, even tragic, and Malkovich plays him tenderly, without overplaying him at all. The supporting characters are more colorful — in fact, more Dickensian — and some of them act a lot saucier, and kinkier, than any character from a Christie novel. And the mystery itself, almost a century later, still works — and still entertains.