A Haunting in Venice

A palpable low point for Kenneth Branagh’s Hercule Poirot series, A Haunting in Venice follows the venerable, now-retired detective (Branagh) as he once again springs into action after a body turns up at a seance. Filmmaker Branagh, armed with Michael Green’s screenplay, delivers a sluggish, virtually momentum-free endeavor that contains few, if any, wholeheartedly compelling elements and attributes, and there’s little doubt, ultimately, that the movie’s arms-length atmosphere is compounded by Branagh’s relentlessly ostentatious visuals and an almost total lack of interesting, compelling periphery characters. And while the film is, at least, kind of watchable in its opening stretch, A Haunting in Venice eventually progresses into a repetitive and momentum-free midsection consisting of an endless series of scenes wherein Poirot interrogates the various suspects – which, when coupled with the pervasively, aggressively dimly-lit atmosphere, confirms the picture’s place as an anticlimactic and hopelessly uninvolving entry in a mostly lackluster franchise.

* out of ****