Teresa Reviews “Sparkling Cyanide” (2003)

Teresa reviews “Sparkling Cyanide” (2003) and gives it a red card for unsportsmanlike plotting.

Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.

Also, follow Teresa’s discussion of these movies on her podcast.

Fidelity to text: 2 ½ glasses poisoned champagne

A reverie from Iris’s point of view became a modern police procedural starring doubles for Tommy and Tuppence.

Quality of movie on its own: 2 ½ glasses poisoned champagne

Good acting, interesting set up, social commentary about the police state and social engineering, but the last ten minutes destroyed the movie.

This 1 hour, 34-minute movie gets terrible reviews. I was riveted until the one hour, 24-minute mark at which point the film snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. The script and director completely lost faith in their material, yet the setup was wonderful!

There are plenty of changes to Agatha’s prose, starting with the focus. The novel is told mainly from Iris’s point of view. It’s also a remembrance of things past as Iris figures out what actually happened to her sister at that fateful party where Rosemary drank poisoned champagne in a crowded nightclub and died.

Colonel Race, Anthony Browne, and Inspector Kemp solve the mystery and rescue Iris. Anthony and Iris live happily ever after.

In this version, Colonel Race becomes sixtyish Colonel Reece. Inspector Kemp turns into a woman and becomes his wife, Catherine, also sixtyish. They both work for a shadowy, investigative wing run by someone highly placed within the British government. Think MI5. They’ve got a charming, bantering, capable and fun Tommy and Tuppence vibe. Because the film’s told from their point of view – as opposed to Iris’ – Sparkling Cyanide becomes the genre Agatha didn’t write: a police procedural.

We see plenty of Iris, Rosemary, George Barton, Ruth, and the Farradays, but they’re no longer the center of the story. It’s Tommy and Tuppence—, I mean, Geoffrey and Catherine enjoying their adventure. Catherine doesn’t have a rank, but she’s obviously important. She even has her own pet hacker on her staff.

Since Stephen Farraday (government minister with a promising future) and his important, well-connected wife, Amanda (Queen’s Counsel) were at the table when Rosemary died, MI5 springs into action. The Prime Minister needs to know if there’s a scandal involving his cabinet minister before the press find out. It’s especially important that Geoffrey and Catherine uncover the truth because the press won’t ignore this sudden death. The hounds will bay and dig until they’ve unearthed every possible juicy, scandalous, newspaper-selling tidbit. Some of it might even be true.

This is because Rosemary’s husband, George Barton, is no longer an anonymous, boring businessman. He’s a crass, tough, scrap-metal millionaire who owns a soccer team. He’s famous and his team’s famous. That makes his wife famous and his wife’s sister Iris moderately famous.

The most famous of all is George’s new star, Carl “Fizz” Fitzgerald. That’s who Anthony Browne morphs into: a soccer star with a tremendous kick, capable of a hat trick. For you non-footy fans, that means our Fizz scored three goals all by himself in one game. This is very hard to do.

Unfortunately, Fabulous Fizz doesn’t get his chance to shine at the end like he should have. The script set him up as energetic, talented, and volatile and then emasculates him for the rest of the film.

And they were all at the night club, at the same table that fateful night, when George delivered a champagne toast that ended in his wife’s death.

So Geoffrey and Catherine spring into action. They enlist Catherine’s pet hacker, Andy. He hacks into Stephen Farraday’s credit card accounts, bank accounts, appointment schedules, and whatever else he can find. He also checks into the Bartons, Iris, and anyone else connected to the case.

There’s not a single mention of search warrants, just cause, or due process of law. Only Andy the hacker is concerned enough about prying into people’s private lives without any judicial oversight to comment on it to Catherine. But that doesn’t stop him. He’s just doing his job.

They discover Farraday had a torrid affair with Rosemary. Being revealed as an adulterer will harm his career and embarrass the Crown. Worse, Stephen is the cabinet minister for sport and recreation. He’s being wooed by George Barton because George wants a knighthood. Who better to plead his case than the minister of sport? Stephen and Rosemary’s illicit connection smacks of corruption. The Fleet Street headline writes itself:

“Barton pimps wife to Minister for knighthood!”

While Andy’s digging deep, Tommy and Tuppence – I mean the Colonel and Catherine – interview suspects and race about London. Their inquiry turns that Rosemary was pregnant but had an abortion.

Meanwhile, George arranges another dinner party. This time, he gets the cyanide-laced champagne and right in front of the Colonel, Catherine, and Andy. They saw it happen, yet never saw a thing.

Meanwhile, we’re watching bits of Fizz (played by a non-charismatic Justin Pierre). There’s a boxing scene that was supposed to show off his manliness. Unfortunately, it looked like the actor couldn’t box worth a darn so the entire scene was shot through a ladder and a staircase railing to conceal his ineptness. Fizz was poorly served by his actor and his script. He’s supposed to be volatile and high-energy, the kind of consummate athlete who’s worth millions. Instead, he was blah.

That might be why – unlike in the novel – he didn’t show up at the climax to rescue Iris! Her desperate calls to him get routed to voicemail, And during the tedious epilogue, we never learn why he was unavailable when she needed him.

CCTV cameras figured prominently, as though the subtext is propaganda in favor of the surveillance society. The colonel and Catherine are constantly looking at footage, very little of it as blurry as you’d expect in real life. Andy tells us that the AI running the software for the cameras is so good that he can tell where a suspect is if a camera only sees a tiny bit of a person. Disguises such as beards, hats, and scarves won’t fool his system; it always gets its man.

The Chinese government would be deeply impressed since despite their best efforts, they’re nowhere near that level of expertise. No one is, for which we should all be grateful.

We reach the climax and the movie falls apart. Instead of using their little gray cells, Catherine and the colonel use CCTV footage to spot the criminal mastermind is. At the same time, Iris is in a panic. She can’t reach Fizz so off she flees to her cousin, Mark Drake. She’ll be safe with him, having not listened to Catherine and the colonel. But when she learns who is behind the murders, she flees. And who comes to her rescue? Catherine, the colonel, and a pack of bobbies.

It should have been Fizz. He’s the love interest and a star soccer player. He should have showed up in that alley, tackled Mark Drake, and used his head as a soccer ball until the constables pulled him off in time to keep Mark alive and able to be brought to trial.

But no. He never shows up.

We also never get an answer as to why Rosemary had the abortion.

The worst loose end was the Farradays. They should have had their subplot wrapped up before the killer was revealed. That’s when Stephen should have told Alexandra that his affair with Rosemary, which he ended, taught him who he really loved: It was her and he’d been too blind to see who was standing in front of him. That’s what Agatha wrote but that’s not what we got.

With a better climax, this would have been a hat trick of a movie instead of an own goal.