Nice effects though.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

I struggle a little with this one, as it's one of the novels I really like, it's a book that draws you in, builds the characters and has a really satisfying conclusion.Bobby Attfield hears a dying mans last words while out walking, 'Why didn't they ask Evans?' With the help of friend Frankie Derwent and later Jane Marple's the lead takes them to the family home of the dysfunctional Savages, as they try to uncover the cryptic message and uncover dark secrets.I'm a really easy Agatha Christie fan to please, it doesn't take a huge deal to make me happy, this one fails pretty much, the characters are almost made into caricatures, they're all a little bit over the top and unbelievable. Apart from Miss Marple and Bobby Attfield most of the others are just a bit too much.There are some nice elements to this story, Julia McKenzie drives the story, she literally is too good for the material and script she's given. Georgia Moffett and Sean Biggerstaff both give fairly good performances. It looks really nice, there is some gorgeous filming, the music also is brilliant, it's really melodic.For the first time in a Marple I actually find some of the acting a bit weak, I have always loved both Samantha Bond and Warren Clarke, but both are below par, Hannah Murray is either poor or dreadfully written, I can't distinguish, but Freddie Fox is abysmal, he looks like he's just going through the motions. Some of the dialogue is quite dull and uninteresting.The ending verges on Melodrama, it's like something you'd expect an am dram group to put on, it just didn't work.I've watched it a few times, on occasion I quite like it, but in comparison to others in the series it is the ugly duckling. 5/10

Not all the recent Marple adaptations are bad or disappointing, Pocket Full of Rye, The Blue Geranium and The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side(I'd go further to say this one especially was the best version of the book) were excellent and Murder is Announced and Moving Finger were surprisingly good too. Why Didn't They Ask Evans? is not as bad as Nemesis, Sittaford Mystery and At Betram's Hotel, but for me it is one of the dullest and more disappointing entries to the series.Is it bad as an adaptation? Yes it is really. The book was a compelling enough read without being definitive, the story and characters were interesting in the book, but the adaptation does a lot of alterations in the sense that the plot is one big rambling, illogical mess with a very unsatisfying and somewhat convoluted conclusion and the characters(more cardboard cut-outs than characters) I felt nothing for. The pacing is also very sluggish and the dialogue is weak, some of it is among the weakest I've heard in a Christie adaptation actually.When it comes to the acting, only Julia McKenzie stands out properly. She is terrific as Miss Marple, with a wisdom and charm that makes you warm to her immediately. Georgia Moffett is decent too as is Sean Biggerstaff, but actors such as Richard Briers are given next to nothing to work with which is shameful in my opinion, Rik Mayall has never looked and acted as bored as he is here and this is one of those rarities where I didn't like Samantha Bond or Warren Clarke either. Bond has a very uninteresting character with some poor dialogue and she manages to be both flaccid and shrill at the same time. Clarke suffers from pretty much the same problems, and his shouting did get tiresome after a while. The worst of the performances comes from Freddie Fox who is really quite awful.Despite all these outweighing criticisms, there is some good, aside from McKenzie. The production values are wonderful, with great photography and beautiful and authentic scenery and costumes. The music is both beautiful and haunting, and the direction also has flashes of brilliance. But really, this could and should have been much better than it was. 4/10 Bethany Cox

I'm not proud. I rented this 90-minute drama so I could catch up with the actress Hannah Murray, who played the lovely Cassie from Skins, a girl any bloke could fall in love with! She hasn't been in much since.As if anticipating said sad sackness, Ms Murray has had something of a reverse makeover and no longer has the blonde flower child look. Her hair is black or dark brunette, pinned up on her head, and she has horn-rimmed spectacles. Murray has a touch of the jolie-laird about her, here's she's more laird. She plays a noisy, assertive, sometimes charming and maybe perverse daughter of an aristocratic family with a secret to hide. If you've seen Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, there's a character similar in it.Murray isn't in it until the half hour mark, but just about holds her own with the others, her diction is a bit garbled though - is it too late to straighten those teeth? One senses that, unlike Skins, her heart isn't really in it and unlike the other actors she doesn't know how to hit her marks and turn in a damage-limitation performance in a drama that clearly is going to be a bit naff. Her brand of charisma isn't required in a part where she is required to seem innocent/suspect by turns, but not much more.There's an all-star cast: Samantha Bond (Miss Moneypenny), Rik Mayall, Richard Briers, Ralf Little from The Fast Show, Doctor Who's Georgia Moffet,Warren Clarke, even the teacher in the first two series of Skins shows up too (Siwan Morris). But it all has a touch of amateur dramatics about it and only the two former comedians pull it off. Bond, when she isn't turning into her former boss Judi Dench, has a tough time of it.There's a certain charm about the young couple investigating a crime, even if having Marple tag along is a bit contrived (she wasn't in the Christie story at all). Generally it just doesn't work because it's not credible; in no way can you believe a family would take Ms Moffett into their bosom and let her stay for a few days, this sort of story would have been more credible in a 1940s-50s adaptation, but this is shot through with a modern sassiness. Ms Moffett is polished but just doesn't have the charm to make it likely, in fact Ms Murray might have been more persuasive, having that blend of flakiness and sneakiness to see her through. It gets more ludicrous as it goes on, with dead-hand exposition and characters turning up just to deliver information so the viewers can get from A-B, but as for Why Didn't They Ask Evans, I couldn't tell you much if I wanted to, the explanation is so long-winded and convoluted. The final scene, where a murder is held off just so Marple can finish her exposition for the viewers in fairness has some intentioned comedy but is beyond farce.As for McKenzie's Marple, she's not so bad but has a touch of the Mrs Doubtfire about her. She has a hawkish way about her, if she asked you what you had for tea, you'd be reluctant to tell her. As least Margaret Rutherford had a bumbling manner that disarmed the opposition.

After watching this inaccurate, insipid film, I've completely given up on these new Agatha Christie adaptions. "Why Didn't They Ask Evans?" was not originally a Miss Marple mystery, and in countless other ways has been altered so drastically that it's hardly recognizable as the same story.I understand that when transforming a novel to TV or film, characters, times, places and events need to be altered, collapsed, edited, etc. for the sake of time and pacing and so on. Fine, we all get that. But it seems as though "Why Didn't They Ask Evans?" hasn't been altered for any logistical reasons; it's so far from the novel (which, by the way, is delightful) that they may as well have gotten rid of the last ties to the original plot and just called it a 'new' Agatha Christie mystery. It was successfully done with the Gershwins (in the form of "Crazy For You," calling it a 'new' Gershwin musical). However abysmal those new stories might be, it would probably infuriate infinitely fewer people if they just wrote new stories instead of destroying classics.