Even its A-list cast couldn’t save this long-delayed adaptation from falling over itself.
It’s wild to think that we’ve had two Kenneth Branagh films released in the space of two weeks, because they couldn’t be more different.
Belfast, nominated for seven Oscars including Best Director for Branagh, is a pulsing, personal film with heart. This week’s effort, the long-delayed Death on the Nile, is a histrionic, turgid affair that stresses more than it entertains.
The stress comes not from the suspense of Agatha Christie’s classic whodunit, but from an overwhelming and heavy-handed score by Scottish composer Patrick Doyle – a score so imposing it threatens to bury every other element with its thundering notes.
The follow-up to 2017 film Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile was slated as a continuation of a potential series starring Branagh as the moustachioed detective Hercule Poirot.
Its star-studded cast including Gal Gadot, Russell Brand, Rose Leslie, Letitia Wright, Annette Bening, Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French finished filming more than two years ago but the release was beset first by covid and then by sexual allegations against actor Armie Hammer.
Hammer is a pivotal character in the film, but you wouldn’t know it from the trailer, where it’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him scenario. Luckily, in a large-enough ensemble cast, he doesn’t make enough of an impression to sour everything around him – especially when the film seems capable of doing that by itself.
Poirot is in Egypt, gazing at the pyramids when he’s invited on a case by wealthy heiress Linnet Ridgeway (Gadot) and her new husband Simon Doyle (Hammer). Jacqueline de Bellefort (Emma Mackey), Linnet’s former friend and Simon’s former fiancé, has been stalking them on their honeymoon.
To try and escape Jacqueline, the lovers board the luxurious Karnak steamer for a river cruise, along with a wedding party of family and friends that Linnet confesses to feeling unsafe among. And Jacqueline finds her way aboard regardless.
As the title suggests, death ensues. With a contained pool of suspects, Poirot’s little grey cells have to work on overdrive to keep the body count low.
Like Murder on the Orient Express, Branagh indulges in the melodramatic, expanding Christie’s parlour mystery to one on a grander scale. But that doesn’t necessarily suit the story, which already has its share of twists and revelations without needing to resort to theatrics.
Without sounding like a Christie purist, there’s something cosy and perhaps even gentle about her whodunits and even though countless screen adaptations have chosen to dial up the drama, there’s something gauche about Death on the Nile.
It’s as if it always just takes it one step too far whether it’s the mannered performances, an arched eyebrow or a swirly camera movement that adds nothing to the moment.
The production and costume designs are opulent while the likes of French, Saunders, Okonedo and Bening class up the joint (Leslie and Brand are criminally underused), but Death on the Nile is no pleasure cruise.
Rating: 2/5
Death on the Nile is in cinemas now
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2022-02-10 09:10:55Z
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