Five Little Pigs (2003)

Better Late Then Never

Best movie ever!

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

Another well executed episode that pays fitting homage to an Agatha Christie novel.David Suchet is the definitive Hercule Poirot once again as he solves this cold case that saw the hanging of an innocent women for killing her husband. Now the daughter seeks solace for both her parents leaving her all those years ago. The great Belgian detective seeks to uncover the truth and as usual discovers all kinds of motives and golden nuggets of information. One of the finer episodes in this great series8/10

Unlike some of the adaptations of Christie' s Poirot, this was very true to the novel. There were a few melodramatic moments in this production that were not true to the novel but they were minor.This is one of the Christie novels where the characterizations were at the heart of the tale. The close-up of all the major characters showed not only how much they suffered from the events of the past but how hollow they had become. It seemed, even in death, the husband and wife were more dynamic than those who orbited around them.The acting was fabulous and Suchet' s Poirot showed subtlety and charm and happily, few of the affectation s he sometimes employed with his quarry and I think Rachael Stirling,as Caroline Crayle was first among equals.This show affected me greatly and won't soon be forgotten.

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.

I always find it difficult to take crime stories seriously, and 'Five little pigs' is no exception. It seems strange that viewers never seem to address the inherent absurdity of a plot such as this one, which involves the coming-together of disparate characters so long after a crime; their apparent willingness, and ability, to describe all they did on that day in minute detail so many years later; and the supernatural perceptiveness of a totally unbelievable foreign detective who is implausibly allowed to detain all 'suspects', to give them uncomplimentary nicknames and, alas predictably, comes up with a clever-dick solution to the mystery and an expose of the murderer's technique and her motives. As other viewers have noticed, extraneous elements have been added, for example the inclusion of a homosexual character (now seemingly compulsory in all filmic and theatrical productions). The acting is, incidentally, quite atrocious. There is to my mind one redeeming factor in this version of 'Five little pigs', namely the admission that the police and the judiciary occasionally get it wrong (in this case, an innocent person is hanged). But I find it quite improbable that the responsible authorities, whether police or judiciary, would allow a private stickybeak from a non- English speaking background to conduct extensive inquiries and interrogations in the kind of setting portrayed in "Five little pigs' (incidentally, am I the only viewer who finds Poirot's English, with the occasional 'merci' and 'madame' thrown in, excruciatingly irritating?). So, to sum it all up, those five little pigs seem to by flying all over the place...