Main cast: Tom Bateman (Bouc), Annette Bening (Euphemia), Kenneth Branagh (Hercule Poirot), Russell Brand (Linus Windlesham), Ali Fazal (Andrew Katchadourian), Dawn French (Mrs Bowers), Gal Gadot (Linnet Ridgeway-Doyle), Armie Hammer (Simon Doyle), Rose Leslie (Louise Bourget), Emma Mackey (Jacqueline de Bellefort), Sophie Okonedo (Salome Otterbourne), Jennifer Saunders (Marie Van Schuyler), and Letitia Wright (Rosalie Otterbourne)
Director: Kenneth Branagh
Is it just me or that mustaches look absolutely ridiculous in this movie? I find myself distracted by it throughout the whole movie, because I am certain that it will soon wiggle and leap off Mr Branagh’s upper lip. This is especially during the opening scene, when Mr Branagh attempts to portray a younger Hercule Poirot as a World War 1 soldier that saves his platoon with his magically awesome and perfect intuition, but all I can see is… that on an actor’s face.
Yes, that.
Death on the Nile follows Murder on the Orient Express as an effort by Mr Branagh to make himself and all his actor and theater friends relevant still in the days when Shakespearean adaptations on big screen are no longer the fad. Given that Woody Allen movies are no longer the place to go for various has-beens and wanna-bes of Hollywood in order to get some cachet of critical acclaim, here’s Mr Branagh keeping to the tradition of prior adaptations of Agatha Christie’s mystery novels, by having a star-studded cast.
One can tell this movie was made before 2020, though, as at least three of the cast members have been or repeatedly been tried to be cancelled by the blue-checked morons on social media. One is cancelled for being an alleged cannibal and covert rapist (Armie Hammer), and two more (Russell Brand and Letitia Wright) have been repeatedly gunned for cancellation, all for the crime of not having opinions that fall in line with those imbeciles on social media.
Sadly for those morons, this movie made enough money to warrant another movie for Mr Branagh to continue transforming Hercule Poirot into his own idealized self of a superhero: good in pugilism, a lady’s man and an anguished torch-carrier of unrequited love all at once, and more.
This time around, Poirot is dragged into messy love drama of heiress Linnet Ridgeway and her newly-wed husband Simon Doyle, as they attempt to avoid Jacqueline de Bellefort, Linnet’s former best friend who was also Simon’s fiancée until, oh, six weeks ago when Linnet married him. Seriously, with friends like these, who needs enemies? Poirot and the other wedding guests of Linnet and Simon board the cruise ship SS Karnak, and weird “accidents” start to happen. Hmm, one can only wonder if the discovery of Jackie having sneaked onboard had anything to do with that…
Oops, then Linnet shows up dead. I hope people aren’t watching this thing for Gal Gadot, because… yeah, her character’s dead.
So, who killed Linnet? Good thing Poirot’s mustache is here to solve the mystery. Oh, and he has a thing for the jazz singer Salome, but does she have a thing for men whose mustache resembles something from an alien movie… possibly something alive and deadly?
I believe I’ve said it before, but I’m not the kind of Agatha Christie fan that remembers every word of her every novel. Actually, I’m not sure that I even qualify as a fan, as I only like some of her crime novels, but sadly none of them features Hercule Poirot. In a way, I suppose that makes me the perfect audience for this one, as it attempts to inject some degree of modernization into the movies, as well as to make Poirot less of a stuffy bloke with dry wit and more of Mr Branagh’s self-insert fantasy.
I am, however, fond of the 1978 adaptation, mostly because I’d watch anything with the late Simon MacCorkindale in it no matter how bad it is, and boy, given how… not so good an actor he was, there were many bad movies indeed. What can I say, I have a thing for pretty boys even if they couldn’t exactly act their way out of a paper bag at times.
Watching this one, I can’t help comparing it to the 1978 adaptation. I don’t think a diet of human meat is doing Mr Hammer any good, because he doesn’t look as good as he normally did in the past. Maybe it’s the alopecia, or the greasy sheen of his skin, or maybe it’s because very few men can compare to Mr MacCorkindale when it comes to looks and smiles.
More significantly, though, is how artificial this movie comes off as. The set pieces feel too shiny, too gaudy, like set pieces assembled together instead of actual places and locations. It also doesn’t help that Mr Branagh’s idea of making things exciting includes some action scenes that appear cartoon-y and even over the top, further making this one more like that Dick Tracy movie. This effect clashes badly with the more down to earth dialogues of the main characters.
The tonal clash is made more evident when the black characters behave more like embodiment of what current day white people considers the ideal black person. Rosalie is the worst embodiment of this: she is sassy, snappy, brassy, and all that’s missing is her flicking her wrist and telling people to talk to her hand—my god, it’s Suri transplanted into a movie that is completely wrong for her. Will a black woman behave like this in 1930s England and colonial Egypt? It’s hard to imagine stuffy, class-conscious white people of that time will tolerate a black woman doing that sassy cartoon-y “Hell no, OKCURRRR?” act at them.
Then again, this movie already has Hercule Poirot acting like a covert autistic-action man-hero thing, so I don’t know. If Mr Branagh wanted to go that route, though, then he should have exaggerated more than the mustache on his character’s upper lip. Up the camp and the audaciousness of the movie, let me know that this is some super hero movie to be enjoyed, like what was done to Sherlock Holmes.
What Mr Branagh ends up doing is to make his character so smart and almost infallible, that the whole movie is about people waiting and looking at him admiringly until he finally deduces the identity of the villain. Sadly, he’s no Peter Ustinov—this version of the so smart, so brilliant, so rescue-everyone-with-his-autistic-savant-awesomeness Poirot ends up being insufferable way too often.
As it is, this one just feels like a movie that doesn’t know what it wants to me. Kenneth Branagh is an actor and director that exists solely to remind everyone that he is the most brilliant, handsome, and astounding person alive in the entire history of human civilization, so he should have just gone balls out and have Hercule Poirot do a flying kick at some Egyptian assassins like Grandpa-does-Assassin’s Creed or something. Maybe the result of that route would be more interesting that this tonally confused, suspense-free thing.
