For a whodunit mystery, the trickiest part isn’t just solving the crime, but keeping the audience on the edge of their seat till the final moment. There is an introduction, a buildup, a crime, and a solution, where the audience is involved as much as the cast members. However, Kenneth Branagh’s Death on the Nile takes its time to grab the audience’s attention, and by the time the crime takes place, they are bored, out of the cinema, or least bothered about the conclusion.
The film follows the ridiculously-mustached Hercule Poirot encountering his friend Bouc (Tom Bateman) and his mother Euphemia (Annette Bening) in Egypt. They ask him to join them at their hotel, where Poirot is surprised to know that Simon Doyle (Armie Hammer) who was engaged to Jacqueline “Jackie” de Bellefort (Emma Mackey) left her to marry her best friend heiress Linnet Ridgeway (Gal Gadot). Now Jackie’s entry into their lives is making the newly-married couple uncomfortable, and they ask Poirot to help them in this regard.
Despite Poirot’s best effort, murder does take place on the Nile (as the name suggests) and he suspects everyone, including his friend Bouc, and his mother who invited him to keep a secret check on her son’s activities. Did the maid (Rose Leslie) kill the victim for financial gain? Did the bestie plan the murder when she saw an unattended gun on the floor? Did the nurse use her knowledge of medicines to get the job done? Was it the doctor (Russel Brand), the lawyer (Ali Fazal), or the jealous ex who decided to step up so that the suspicion falls on anyone but themselves?
Although Hercule Poirot catches the killer in the end, it comes too late as more people died before the case was solved. The characters were changed from the novel, the murderers weren’t; however, had the writer Michael Green stayed closer to the source material, it would have made a better film. There was no need to bring in a cousin or a songstress to the party and had Agatha Christie wanted to do that, she would have done it herself in the book.
The film borrows the plot from the novel but before that adventure, the director has one adventure of his own, for no specific reason. Kenneth Branagh, who also plays the Belgian detective, decided to give a backstory to his character, unnecessarily. To sit through that, you have to get used to a de-aged Kenneth Branagh as a young Hercule Poirot who saves his army platoon by using his ‘little grey cells’. Sadly, his captain wasn’t as meticulous as him and died in a blast that disfigured Poirot’s face. It was this disfiguring that made him grow a mustache, and if that sounds silly to you, you are not alone.
Those who have grown up reading and watching Poirot, know how obsessed the Belgian detective was with symmetry and was a clean freak as well. How he would have reacted even if it meant asymmetry or scars on his own face is something none of his fans want to know. He was never in the army and when the First World War took place, he was a world-class detective who had never been on the battlefield. In fact, he was a Belgian refugee who took residence in Great Britain and helped the authorities solve cases for the rest of his life.
As for the film, it would have been a contender had it been made as a modern film set in the 1930s instead of a film that was set in the 1930s and made as a film of that era. It began like a classic mystery flick, where characters were introduced, Poirot was asked to be a part of their group, and a ‘fear’ was brought in to make the plot interesting. By the time the murder took place, the film was halfway over, and the audience felt cheated.
Yes, the plot would have been great had Death on the Nile been released before its prequel Murder On The Orient Express but since the audience was familiar with the plot, they wanted the film to end so that they could go home and carry on with their business. Death on the Nile might win the award for its ensemble cast that features the best actors in the business. However, the presence of Armie Hammer, Gal Gadot, Annette Benning, Ali Fazal, Tom Bateman, Russell Brand, Dawn French, Rose Leslie, Emma Mackey, Sophie Okonedo, and Letitia Wright wasn’t able to save this murder mystery from sinking into the Nile.
The main characters have no chemistry and except for the steaming dance at the start of the film, there seems to be less emotion and more dialogue in the movie. And in 2022, people want action on-screen since dialogues are kept for television shows. Had the filmmakers known that, they could have used their imagination to enhance the script instead of wasting everyone’s time in a fabricated origin story that was not needed at all.
The star of the film isn’t Kenneth Branagh’s Poirot but the actors playing characters – the wide-eyed crazy ex-lover played by Emma Mackey, the suspicious cousin Andrew played by Ali Fazal, the convenient doctor on board played by Russell Brand among others. Armie Hammer and Gal Gadot could have set the screen on fire with their sizzling chemistry but it is nowhere, for some reason.
It’s a good thing that Dame Agatha Christie is not around to watch the latest version of her famous novel Death on the Nile on the big screen. Otherwise, she would have politely asked Kenneth Branagh to stop meddling with her creation Hercule Poirot and let someone else play the role, as it was intended when he came on board as the director some seven years back.
