Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The ABC Murders’ On Amazon Prime, Where John Malkovich Plays A Retired Hercule Poirot

Despite the fact that Agatha Christie has been gone for over 40 years, her novels are still popular fodder for TV and movies. Just recently, Amazon had a miniseries of her novel Ordeal By Innocence. But now they and the BBC are venturing into sacred territory to Christie’s fans, rethinking everyone’s idea of her classic detective, Hercule Poirot. John Malkovich plays the Belgian detective in a three-episode miniseries adaptation of The ABC Murders, and it’s certainly different. Read on for more…

THE ABC MURDERS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A close-up of the hammers of a typewriter as they peck out a note “Don’t be lonely, I’m here watching you. Chin-chin, A.B.C.”

The Gist: London, 1933. A man named Alexander Bonaparte Cust (Eamon Farren) checks into a boarding room. He’s a silk stockings salesman, but his luggage is full of things that don’t make a ton of sense. For one, he has a typewriter. For another, he has a couple off dozen copies of an ABC train station guide. Why he has them, we’re not sure about yet.

Meanwhile, retired detective Hercule Poirot (John Malkovich) keeps getting typewritten notes from an “A.B.C.” in his mail. Those notes say that A.B.C. is watching him, and that he’s almost ready to start doing what he does best (i.e. killing people). Poirot is feeling his age; after being ignored by Scotland Yard’s Inspector Crome (Rupert Grint), he goes to his retired contact there, Chief Inspector Japp (Kevin McNally), and bemoans the fact that his renowned crime solving skills aren’t being used by Crome, and that he still doesn’t feel like he belongs in England, two decades after moving there from Belgium. Japp invites Poirot in for lunch… then promptly drops dead.

A note comes in to Poirot telling him the first place where A.B.C. will go: Andover. In Andover, Cust finds Alice Asher (Tamzin Griffin), who runs a tobacconist shop. Meanwhile, Poirot dyes his beard and approaches Crome at Japp’s funeral. Japp dismisses Poirot’s intuition, making fun of the murder parties he used to be a part of in the past; he also takes glee in noting that the detective’s beard dye is dripping. But when the police blotter from Andover is given to Crome, Poirot notices that the proprietor of the Andover tobacco shop didn’t come to the door when her window was broken.

Poirot arrives in town, and eventually figures out who the first victim is, finding Asher’s body in the back of the shop, with the “A” page of the railway guide open. Crome arrives on the scene and again completely ignores Poirot; despite Poirot’s observations of the crime scene, the local cops arrest Asher’s husband for the murder.

The process starts over again in Bexhill with Betty Barnard (Eve Austin), who is a gadfly and in her sister Megan’s (Brownwyn James) words, a “slut.” She’s found in a beach cabana with the “B” page of the guide open, and Poirot surveys the scene. At this point, Crome has his officers seize Poirot’s file, including all of A.B.C.’s notes; he’s suspicious of why Poirot is getting these notes, and thinks he’ll solve the crimes without the detective.

Our Take: Agatha Christie fans (like we are, at least when we were younger) might not recognize much about this new version of The ABC Murders, aside from the notes Poirot gets and the fact that he’s likely going to befriend the dead people’s family members (if he doesn’t know them already) in order to help him solve the crimes. Poirot is significantly older and retired in this version, no handlebar mustache, no severe Belgian accent. Malkovich plays him as more of a slightly-stooped old man who is still confident in his investigative skills, but is fighting against Crome and others who think he’s a buttinsky. Poirot is going at this alone, no Hastings to help him out. And Japp isn’t there to bail him out when Crome starts to doubt him.

It’s quite daring of screenwriter Sarah Phelps and director Alex Gabassi to take such a well-covered novel and a beloved character and modify them so severely. But we should be fair to them and take their version of The ABC Murders on face value and not compare it to Christie’s original text or the other TV and movie versions that have been made. That being said, this version is slow and dark, injecting a horror aspect and themes of immigration that seem out of place in what’s a straightforward murder mystery.

Malkovich does fine once you let go of the concept of what Poirot is usually like; he inhabits the detective with his signature strange energy, though he tamps it down a bit. Because of the dark themes that have been added to this version, a “classic Poirot,” like David Suchet’s version, wouldn’t have worked. As odd as it may look, the right actor is playing Poirot here; if Malkovich’s character was named something else, he’d likely be considered for an Emmy for his performance. We just wish the tone wasn’t so grisly and full of “messages.”

One thing we will give Phelps and Gabassi credit for: While it may look like Cust is the A.B.C. murderer, they have given enough space to put doubt in viewers minds. We don’t see him doing the deed, and we don’t know why he looks beaten up after every murder. It could be him, but it might not. At least in that respect, they seem to be hewing close to the book.

Sex and Skin: Nothing in part one.

Parting Shot: Cust is in his room, and he puts a stocking in a clean rail book next to the “C” page. He then stretches, looks up, takes out a flickering light bulb, and then just stares out the window in his dark room.

Sleeper Star: Grint is pretty convincing as the young but grizzled Inspector Crome. We had to look up his IMDb to confirm that he’s only 30.

Most Pilot-y Line: This is a good spot to point out some anachronisms, or at least seeming anachronisms. One that’s definite; the hooker daughter of the woman who runs Cust’s boarding house hums “Over The Rainbow,” which was six years away from being written in 1933. In another scene, a cop calls Asher’s husband a “sack of shit,” which may have been a phrase that was around back then, but still feels out of place.

Our Call: STREAM IT, but be aware that it’s not your mother’s or grandmother’s idea of Christie or Poirot.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.