Movie Review: Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears

My wife and I have enjoyed the Miss Fisher mysteries (and the spinoff Ms Fisher mysteries, set 50 years later and involving a character who is somehow Miss Fisher's neice). They have excellent production values and are amusingly written and acted, but we weren't so enamoured of this one. 

It's not so much a Miss Fisher mystery as a piece of Miss Fisher fanfic, in which two of the established characters participate in rather a silly pulp adventure plot that's full of holes. I don't recall the supernatural being real in Miss Fisher prior to this, but this one has Indiana Jones-style mystic curses. Not to mention obviously misspelled Greek on a pillar that somehow always points to the same star even though the stars move around on a daily and annual basis and have shifted significantly since the time of Alexander the Great, when the pillar was supposedly set up; and an astrolabe from Alexander's time (the astrolabe was invented a century after Alexander's death) that somehow guides the characters to an exact place based on observations of the sun (I assume; it was being used during the day), even though there's no indication that they have anything to tell them what latitude they're looking for, and an astrolabe can't tell you longitude. There's even an occurrence of the hoary old trope of a fall into quicksand (popular as a hazard in adventure movies of the 1960s, but almost unheard of now, not least because humans can't actually sink all the way into quicksand), in the middle of the desert, where quicksand is unlikely. A character turns up, for dramatic purposes, near the end, even though there's really no plausible explanation for how that character could have followed the other characters and caught up to them. It's pretty dumb all the way around. 

Also, what is it with emeralds right now? There are two emeralds (including an implausibly large one, cut in an anachronistic manner) in this movie; there's another implausibly large one in Sonic 2, I believe; and they even came into the Agatha Raisin Christmas movie we watched yesterday. Has someone come up with a superior method of making prop emeralds or something? 

Anyway, it was amusing enough if you took it for what it was, but monumentally silly and not really a Miss Fisher story. I got the feeling that the writer wished she had the rights to Indiana Jones and made do with another property that was more accessible. Even the sets felt more like sets than the original series. 

Miss Fisher fans should probably avoid this one. Three stars, for being somewhat amusing.