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

I have absolutely never seen anything like this movie before. You have to see this movie.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Blistering performances.

It bemuses me that television writers believe they can 'improve' upon a story written by the best-selling author of the twentieth-century. Miss Marple did not appear in the original novel, so it was a bold stance to introduce her to this tale - that is perhaps the only way that the TV writer actually demonstrated some skill, by managing to inter-twine her among the other events. There is a truly excellent cast, floundering against a poor script, made especially bad by the necessity to introduce a character by the name of Evans. The original story is effectively mentioned in passing in a few of the key events from the original story, but that is as close this production gets to actually having anything to do with the real Christie story. In reality this is a new story by someone who just got so many elements wrong! I cannot classify this as 1 (awful) because the highly skilled actors do the best they can to pull off a reasonable performance, but this is not a good production. Julia McKenzie tried very hard but she just did not appear anything like the Miss Marple that Dame Agatha created, perhaps because her part was created by a television writer not the late, great mistress of crime fiction. 2 and a half out of 10 is the best I could give to this effort.

This is so remote from Agatha Christie's original that it almost amounts to a caricature - if only it was that good! Part of the problem is one that dogs the whole series, that there is desperation to stuff the cast with celebrities, even if they have little experience of dramatic acting. Second, there is a determination to include so called 'issues' such as drug addiction, soap opera style romantics - one dimensional; relationships which are driven by plot rather than character. Then there is the overblown hysterical screeching which these people believe to be serious dramatic presentation. One difficulty for all adapters of the stories is that, whatever the quality of Christie's plotting, it works within its own world. They are locked into their period and the qualities and issues this writer has tried to foist onto them are completely anachronistic. The 'big movie' music and setting does not work- this is small village stuff. The attempt at film noire shows the limitations of the director- nothing builds or develops, the narrative thread is broken into twenty second bites which just come out as confused. this director should stick to small commercials. Last, but not least, Christie is tongue-in-cheek about her plots and they are always laced with irony and dark humour. In some of her novels she even introduces a novelist who is a send-up of herself. (Ariadne Oliver). This production has completely lost track of Christie's well developed humour and replaced it with crude and amateur posturing!

Like her predecessor Geraldine McEwan, the new Miss Marple, Julia McKenzie, has a great deal to overcome. The main issue is the skewed adaptation of Agatha Christie's original. While I do love Christie and Miss Marple, I'm actually getting a great deal of enjoyment out of this series. Yes, it's NOT Miss Marple to the word, and "Evans" never was a Marple Story. I read the book a few months ago and in my opinion, that book wasn't one of Christie's best. It's not a biggie with me that they've placed Miss Marple in it or they've made changes to the story. I simply enjoy watching mysteries made in England and set in other time periods. There's murder without buckets of blood and tons of gore on the screen, like we get here in the states. They murder each other while being beautifully dressed and serving tea and scones. Miss Marple cuts below the facade and gets her man.....or woman. She does't drop a stitch either. All in a day's work.

This novel of Christie's is one of my favorites for its charm, it's wonderful characters of Frankie and Bobby and it's immensely witty plot. It was wonderfully adapted already into a magnificently faithful version which had superb costumes, but the way. This mishmosh bore no resemblance to the novel and was poorly acted as well. Why would any writer think they could take an Agatha Christie title and then just change it around into something better? When Perfection has been reached, there is no where else to go. If the writer is such a great writer, let him write his own mystery story.Please, please stop making these awful, embarrassing adaptations and leave Agatha intact before someone who doesn't read her books tunes in and thinks this is really her work. They will wonder why her reputation has lasted nearly 100 years.