127m/PG-13
After the train wreck (pun intended) that director/star Branagh made out of Murder on the Orient Express, I approached Death on the Nile (one of my favorite books by Agatha Christie, whose work I have been reading for something like four decades) with nausea and trepidation. As expected, I hated it - but oddly, not for all the reasons I expected.
It's hard not to watch this one without comparing it to the wonderful 1978 film version starring Peter Ustinov - especially considering Branagh obviously borrowed ideas and dialogue from that one for his version - but to start, the story is about a young, beautiful heiress named Linnet Ridgeway (a wooden Gal Gadot), who has just betrayed her many long years of friendship with Jacqueline De Bellefort (Emma Mackey - and look quickly, you don't see much of her throughout) by stealing away Jackie's soon-to-be husband, Simon Doyle (Armie Hammer, former actor now publicity disaster) for herself. Married now, Linnet and Simon decide to honeymoon in Egypt, but soon find their celebration thwarted at every turn when Jackie suddenly and mysteriously shows up - wherever they go - to taunt and low-key threaten them. With the famous Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot making his own trip down the Nile, Jackie and Simon beseech him to help steer Jackie away ... but when Linnet is found shot to death in her bed one morning, Jackie with an iron-clad alibi, it's up to Poirot to ferret out the clues among the suspects on board (many of whom had plenty of reason, as it turns out, to hate Linnet), and discover the killer.
First, the elephant in the room: Branagh took obscene liberties with both the canon and Poirot's backstory, opening the film with a flashback scene that details how Poirot came to wear his famous and elegant mustache. It's ridiculously melodramatic, and comes off as nothing more than Kenneth Branagh showing off ... well, Kenneth Branagh.
And what I would soon realize, watching this, is that THAT is the problem with the film: Branagh doesn't understand how mysteries work, and Branagh wants only Branagh as the focus of the film, making sure he is in nearly every scene. Those of us who've loved Christie since childhood, and have watched and read in the mystery genre for decades, understand that, in mysteries, you generally start off introducing the detective (amateur or otherwise), and end with the detective's solution to wrap up the novel ... but in the middle, while the detective detects the actual focus is on the victim(s) - who they were, their past - and, more importantly, the suspects. You let the suspects interact with the detective and each other, telling their side of why they are innocent even as both detective and reader tries to muddle through what are lies and what are truths. The detective is there, but the suspects shine. Not with Branagh as Poirot. Here, he has put together a strong ensemble cast ... then doesn't let them shine. It's all about Poirot, his emotions and frustrations and reactions. With the exception of Sophie Okonedo, who grabs what Branagh gives her and rings every ounce of magnetism she can from it as Salome Otterbourne, the rest of the cast is filler. Totally unlike the 1978 version. Also different is that in that version viewers get a very strong sense of how Poirot came to his solution; how he followed the clues. Not so with Branagh's Poirot, who seems to pull it together from thin air. The scenes of Poirot and various suspects standing in the tiny meat freezer with Linnet's covered body, meat hanging around them, are unintentionally funny (and insulting, when in a later scene, Branagh seems to want to make it funny when Poirot actually straightens out one of the corpse's feet, as they stick out under the sheet, so both are pointing in the right direction). The effects are bloated - Egypt looks like it was colorized by Ted Turner on a bender - and I can't even get into the finale, where the solution comes with a loaded gun (see, Branagh's Poirot is a tough dude), deductions Poirot seems to have gleaned from nowhere, and one dead body that somehow remains standing up, even after death. And don't get me started on the tag scene at the end, which again gives both Christie and the canon she created the middle finger.
Sadly, Branagh is already committed to ripping Christie a new one yet again, with a third film. One can only hope he'll actually read a few of her books - or some mysteries in general - in the meantime, at the least. He's so talented an actor and director, but has no business doing both with these films, where you're talking ensemble pieces and not The Branagh Show. 1/5 stars
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