It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

Bobby Attfield is walking along a cliff top when he spies a body at the foot of the cliff. He rushes down to the man, whose dying words are "Why didn't they ask Evans?". He is convinced that something nefarious has just occurred and his suspicions are heightened when he misses the man's inquest, due to being sent the incorrect time and location for the inquest. In his corner is Frankie Derwent and an old friend of the family, Miss Marple.Started well. The murder was intriguing and the relationship between Bobby and Frankie, solidly played by Sean Biggerstaff and Georgia Moffett, was a great sub-plot. However, the mystery seemed to get overly complex, simply for complexity's sake, after a point and the climax, and back-story, is quite far-fetched. Not all bad, but could have been so much better.Some big names in the supporting cast but they aren't all used well. Natalie Dormer is fine in her role but Warren Clarke overdoes the alpha male routine, resulting in him shouting almost all his lines. Rik Mayall is wasted in his part, and doesn't have much screen time anyway. Hannah Murray is incredibly irritating.

Julia McKenzie becomes the latest in a long line of actresses to essay the part of Agatha Christie's spinster sleuth Miss Jane Marple. She may look like she's engrossed in her knitting, but she doesn't let anything escape her attention.In this story McKenzie is joined by two young companions, in fact one of them is young Sean Biggerstaff who finds a dying man on a cliff near his home. He lives long enough to give the words of the title as his last words. So why didn't they ask Evans, whomever Evans is? The trail leads them to the Savage family mansion and this is one crazy crew. Two brothers who were the breadwinners died and the rest are a lot of upper crust wastrels with no intention of being anything else. That leads to opening up a large can of worms and an elaborate murder plot that claims another victim and the final victim is still a target.By this time McKenzie and Biggerstaff are joined by Frankie Derwont who must have read some Nancy Drew books imported from America. She's a persistent young woman and Biggerstaff and her have some chemistry, but it takes time to gel.Christie stories are timeless and the BBC has a new Marple who looks like she's enjoying the part.

A disappointing episode with an excessive amount of change and improbabilities and an outbreak of overacting from many players,from Mayall to Murray to Clarke to Williams,is really saved from the disaster by the generous efforts of Sean Biggerstaff and,above all, of Georgia Moffett,really shining as the two junior detectives,and singularly overwhelming titular sleuth McKenzie,reduced to a simple,if skillful,sparring partner for the two Partners in Crime.Frankie and Bobby,and a good Natalie Dormer as the mysterious Dark Lady of an exceedingly convoluted plot where the awkward additions to the Agatha's adventure really don't add too well,save the TV movie from the catastrophe of Sittaford and of the very awful Appointment in the Marple's sibling series Poirot.In some way,the plot is similar in the basic structure to Agatha's novel,and we are here far from the worst.Evans is not the Abominable Bachelor of late Jeremy Brett,but certainly is not a very pleasant plot.It's a pity,because the first half of the movie was very amusing, and a bit more of fidelity to the source could have driven it easily to the Golden Dozen of the Marple Marvels.

Indescribably preposterous! Slightly better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick...SLIGHTLY! Absolute rubbish!!Nothing more need be said about this grotesquely mutilated (Miss Marple does not appear in Dame Agatha's original, sniff, sniff.) perversion of Agatha Christie's moderately readable, but by no means vintage, whodunit. It has been "revised" beyond recognition by the screen writer (whose name I do not know, nor do I wish to know it) and were it not for the fact that this website requires that the utterly dismissible (In the instant case, the subject ghastly flop) be discussed at length (ten line minimum comment...can you imagine? What can these people be thinking of?) I should not have wasted any more of the readers time than it would have taken to read the opening volley! My apologies but, it seems the entertainment industry's appetite for discourse upon itself has no limits. Alas!