BlazeLime Strong and Moving!

Wordiezett So much average

Matho The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

Bumpy Chip It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

merrywater Simply the best adaptation of any of Agatha Christie's novels.The best novel is in my opinion "Ten Little N*****s" aka "Ten Little Indians" aka "And then there were none". Unfortunately, it has never been successfully adapted to the screen. The most celebrated version, and I refuse to understand why, is René Claire's of 1945, which is completely out of the realms of the original atmosphere, though superficially partly true to the plot."Five Little Pigs" - another novel with a numeral in the title - is not one of Christie's best. A rather amusing trifle, that's all. This adaptation manage, not only to stick to the original story, but to amplify it. I think that what the director did to a great effect, was to shoot the historical sequences in an individual fashion, compared to the rest of the picture. The light becomes yellowish, the zooming is almost as if in a news transmission. On top of this the haunting musical score, mostly Satie, and you have a delicious meal out of yesterday's left overs. Or am I bit harsh on the original novel? What differs slightly from the novel is the depiction of the murderer, whom, I seem to recall, was not threatened by persecution. Elsa Greer was, perhaps, a bit unrelentingly depicted in the picture. The addition of the gay themed relation between the first victim and his childhood friend, is quite moving, and as expected not even inferred to in the novel. "Five Little Pigs" is a very erotic adaptation of a Christie, one might add.Good acting. Especially in comparison with the accomplishments of the cast of "Murder in Mesopotamia"...

Edu-16 Quite the best Christie adaptation I or my wife have seen to date. We were particularly surprised by how emotionally engaged we were. Where as with most detective stories you remain dispassionate, quietly observing from the outside, FLP draws you in to care about the characters and come the final denouement we are both intellectually and emotional rewarded by the resolution.The direction and story telling are perfect - cutting neatly between the present and five flashback accounts of the same 14 yrs old incident. We are led gently up all manner of garden paths, and even allowed to think we've 'nailed it' only to have our smugness shot down in the final reel. The acting is far above the norm, and the casting, especially of the flashback 'younger versions', particularly effective.FLP is lovely to look at - with a nice contrast for the flashbacks to a heightened, over exposed look, and lovely to listen to - the score is a magnificently clever variation of the basic Poirot theme.Yes - an all round joy that we even wanted to watch again the next day. A 'whodunit first' for us!

Robert J. Maxwell This is one of Dame Agatha's more engaging conundrums, though not exactly the kind of acute examination of "the psychology" that Hercule Poirot (David Suchet) claims it is.Let's see. There is one of those perfervid painter-types, Amyas Crale, a Byronic figure, married to a good-enough wife but having one affair after another. He drinks a glass of beer and drops dead, poisoned in the proper British manner. The deed seems to have been prompted by Crayle's announcement that this time his love affair with his model (Julie Cox) was serious and he intended to shrug off his marriage and replace his wife with his model. The wife is convicted and, without any protest from her, hanged. That was fourteen years ago. Now, the daughter is convinced of her mother's innocence and hires Poirot to investigate.So who did it? Well, there were only about half a dozen people present at the isolated rural mansion at the time of the murder. Was it Crayle's best friend from boyhood (Toby Stephens)? Maybe it was Meredith, another boyhood friend who is always skulking around and who, after all, had a collection of chemicals in the basement, the poison among them. Or maybe it was Crayle's own daughter, blinded in one eye by her mother years ago, killing her father in order to frame her mother who is the obvious suspect. Might it not have been Julie Cox, the model he was apparently about to marry? But, no. What motive would she have for killing her lover? Could Crayle's wife actually be GUILTY? Or was there some stranger out of the past who sneaked in and did the dirty deed? Well -- not that. Because all of Agatha Christie's plots involve only the suspects who are around at the time of the murder.Now, I'll tell you who did it. (Not really.) I enjoyed this more than most of the movie-length episodes in the series for a couple of reasons. One is that there was no subordinate or embedded crime, irrelevant to the murder itself, that might have thrown the plot off kilter. None of the suspects is a closet jewel thief or anything. It's a nice clean mystery. Second, I could tell the characters apart. As always, they're introduced with a name and a phrase and we're given a two-second shot of the suspect's face. But this time there seemed to be fewer suspects, and they LOOKED different from one another. Toby Stephens I already recognized from "The Great Gatsby" TV production, which should have been called "The Great Blunder." The others had some visible distinguishing characteristic -- the beard; the disfigured face; the great enormous stupendous colossal raccoon-like exopthalmic eyeballs of Julie Cox, the model, who looks as if she could eat a normal human being alive by nibbling him to death with her pupils. I haven't read the novel but I imagine some modernization has gone on. The artist and Toby Stephens, as it turns out, were more than just friends during their boyhood.David Suchet IS Poirot, giving a shaded performance much different from his splashier big-screen counterparts.I admired, too, the tale for having a moral behind it. Van Gogh, Modigliani, Toulouse-Lautrec, Jackson Pollack, and the rest notwithstanding -- one should never drink while trying to paint. Not unless you want your model to turn up with three breasts.

bensonmum2 Finally! I've now seen all of the feature length installments of the Poirot movies featuring David Suchet. And wouldn't you know it – the last one I watch just happens to be one of the best of the entire series.Five Little Pigs, which happens to benefit from staying fairly true to Agatha Christie's original work (at least as best as I can remember), is a poignant, gut-wrenching, and beautifully filmed movie. As Christie did in her novel, the mystery is told though a series of five interviews that flashback to that fateful day when a murder was committed. Director Paul Unwin handles this portion quite nicely. I was worried about all the hand-held shaky-cam, but it works well for the iffy memories of events of fourteen years previous. Even though I knew the outcome, I thought the mystery elements were well done. I think someone without knowledge of the plot would really enjoy this part of Five Little Pigs. The acting, other than the abysmal performance of Aimee Mullins as the adult Lucy, is more than acceptable. By now (or by 2003 at least), Suchet has grown in the role of Poirot to the point that I cannot imagine anyone else even attempting to do the character. Two other real highlights for me were the music (it's quite beautiful) and the photography (there are some gorgeous landscape shots throughout the movie). All together, an 8/10 seems about right by me. Had the adult Lucy not been so distractingly poorly played, I could have easily rated Five Little Pigs higher.