Death On The Nile Review

Agatha Christie is the most-read mystery writer of all time. Christie's literary work has obviously influenced director / lead actor of Death On The Nile Kenneth Branagh, who has said that he finds it possible that there could be a cinematic universe of sorts of Christie films.

Death On The Nile is the sequel to the 2017 film, Murder On The Orient Express. Branagh's clever usage of black and white to show Poirot's humble beginnings as a farmer-turned-soldier seemed to set the stage for what was to follow. It also helped add a human side to the otherwise-pompous detective, portraying his lost love and how that one relationship had changed him.

If you ask us, we'd have liked more of it, and less of whatever it was that followed.

Hercule Poirot (Kenneth Branagh), the magnificent moustached detective, is dragged onto a luxury boat, the Karnak, his idyllic holiday cut short by joining a newly-wed couple's honeymoon entourage. The heiress of ill-gotten wealth Linnet Ridgeway (Gal Gadot) gets married to Simon Doyle (Armie Hammer) after a whirlwind romance that rubs her old friend and Simon's previous partner Jacqueline de Bellefort (Emma Mackey) the wrong way - with the couple unable to get away from the woman's stalking.

With a large cast of friends and family atop the vessel, it falls to Poirot to ensure that nothing goes awry, especially after he finds out that many of the people on board have previous conflicts with each other. With some convincing from his friend Bouc (Tom Bateman), the famed detective puts his little grey cells to work - but not before a tragic series of events is set in motion.

Murder On The Orient Express, by Christie's own admission, was one of her favourites. Death On The Nile, on the other hand, enjoys no such admiration - and it shows. That being said, Branagh's adaptation is very faithful to the book - some would say too faithful, offering nothing new from the other adaptations of the source material. Lavish production values give the film a slight air of sophistication, and the seriousness with which the film treats itself actually manages to make it work. The movie stumbles, however, with its attempts at humour, with a politically radical (of that period, of course) relative being the only funny character. In a world where Knives Out exists, this seems unforgivable.

Branagh's approach makes the audience feel like they're given a looking glass into older-style content while simultaneously not taking modern values out of it. We have an Indian actor, two dark-skinned actresses, and mentions of racial inequality that are firmly products of our time. Christie actually wrote a book with the N-word in its original title, so we're mostly not complaining about these changes. MOSTLY, because there are some weird issues like Ali Fazal being a random brown "cousin" in an otherwise very white family.

The ensemble cast doesn't have the starpower of the previous movie, but it feels like most characters have more to do individually. Branagh with his extremely in-your-face moustache seems to have a blast playing the eccentric detective, but Emma Mackey's jilted Jackie is the most memorable character, and she seems to have better chemistry with Armie Hammer than Gal Gadot, ironically.

Indeed, Gal Gadot and Armie Hammer do not work together at all, which makes the whole "head-over-heels, break-other-engagements" romance rather unbelievable. Sophie Okonedo delivers some crisp lines, and Annette Benning and Tom Bateman share an easy back-and-forth relationship that one would expect from a mother-son duo. Ali Fazal, Rose Leslie, Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French have little to do, while Russel Brand plays a soft-spoken doctor that feels like the very opposite of his loud image.

Branagh's decision to go with 65mm gives the movie a highly polished, almost glossy feel - that both work largely in its favour. For example, Gadot's entrance into a smoke-filled club feels larger than life, like old-school Hollywood movies. CGI makes the pyramids feel wonky, but we still have some very memorable images, mostly of the Nile at various times of the day.

Patrick's Doyle's score is serviceable, and sounds overpowering only once or twice. For the most part, the focus is more on the dialogue, and the score is content to be in the background.

Old-fashioned, but nevertheless not unentertaining, Death On The Nile is not unwatchable if you have time to kill. Although it isn't even the best adaptation of its namesake book, leave alone being better than the prequel or the other adaptations of Christie's works, the movie has a certain charm due to its steadfast faith in the entertaining power of Agatha Christie's story-telling. If only it was about thirty minutes shorter.