Kenneth Branagh’s second adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot stories forgets the simple pleasures of ensemble excess and pure messing about.
The trickiest part of a murder mystery isn’t solving the crime. It’s keeping the intrigue and fun alive until then. “Death on the Nile,” Kenneth Branagh’s second adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot stories, forgets the simple pleasures of ensemble excess and pure messing about.
After Poirot’s lavish origin story set in World War I, we’re whisked away to a London music club with some spicy dancing, and then to an Egyptian wedding holiday. There, a love triangle fans the flames for a blowup. The preening heiress Linnet (Gal Gadot) and her beau, Simon Doyle (Armie Hammer) can’t shake Simon’s lurker ex, Jacqueline (Emma Mackey), who follows them onto the fateful Nile riverboat.
As in many Christie screen adaptations (this one written by Michael Green), a motley bunch awaits accusation on board. The former comedy duo Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French reunite as Linnet’s socialite godmother and companion. Sophie Okonedo and Letitia Wright play Salome, a blues singer, and her business-savvy daughter (a nice reimagining of Angela Lansbury’s Salome, a tippling erotic novelist in the 1978 version). There’s also a criminally underused Annette Bening as a painter, and Russell Brand as a doleful doctor.
But their byplay remains rather airless, except for Okonedo, Mackey and Thomas Bateman as Poirot’s hapless, vaguely Wodehousian pal. Round and round Poirot goes, as does the circling camerawork, before he performs the reliably satisfying triple-axel-twisty feat of exegesis in front of the suspects.
More often than not, Branagh’s Poirot simply lacks personality, and the film’s absolutely smoldering epilogue oozes more mood than all the rest put together.
Death on the Nile
Rated PG-13 for violence (it’s a murder mystery) and sexual material. Running time: 2 hours 7 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
