Movie review: Death on the Nile is stylish but more melodramatic than expected
Death on the Nile
★★★☆☆
Pyramids, riverboats, the broad, majestic Nile: Kenneth Branagh’s Death on the Nile (12A), adapted from one of Agatha Christie’s best-known mystery novels, is a sumptuous affair.
At least, it is once we get past an ill-advised opening section that situates Poirot in the trenches of WWI (the Poirot of Christie’s novels was a Belgian refugee when he arrived in London during the War) and get the main characters steaming upriver: Poirot (Branagh), of course, along with the newly married Simon and Linnet Doyle (Armie Hammer and Gal Gadot), Poirot’s pal Bouc (Tom Bateman), Bouc’s mother Euphemia (Annette Bening), and the squabbling friends Marie (Jennifer Saunders) and Bowers (Dawn French), most of whom, we quickly learn, bear some kind of ill-will towards Linette.
The mood gets even more fraught when Simon’s ex-fiancée Jacqueline (Emma Mackey) comes aboard, and soon the air is thick with jealousies, recriminations and potential motives for murder.
Two hours isn’t an overly long running time for a feature-length film about Poirot (the 1978 version, starring Peter Ustinov, was 15 minutes longer), but the issue here is how Kenneth Branagh chooses to spend that time.
Had he eschewed the WWI trenches and an extended sequence set in a London nightclub, and allowed the characters to develop when they were already steaming up the Nile, the story might have been a good deal more tense than it is. It would also have given his cinematographer, Haris Zambarloukous, a little more time to linger on the stunning scenery and ancient architecture.
Instead, the critical events all seem to happen rather quickly, with most of the crucial action confined to a 15 or 20 minute period when Poirot sifts through the small shoal of red herrings with his usual unerring genius.
Gal Gadot oozes class as the aristocratic Linette, and Emma Mackey is delightfully unhinged as the jilted lover Jacqueline, but while this is a very stylish Death on the Nile, it’s rather more melodramatic than Agatha Christie’s fans might expect.
(cinema release)
