Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of “Death on the Nile” begins with a sequence that is miles removed from Agatha Christie — indeed, it feels like a Branagh has spliced in a missing reel from “1917.” In an unbroken take, his camera snakes through a WWI-era foxhole, ending with the delivery of orders for a suicide mission. But maybe not. A young farmer and solider, Hercule Poirot (played by a de-aged Branagh), saves the day with a battle strategy based on his keen powers of observation, only to have his face scarred by a land mine detonated by his captain. He is visited in the hospital by his fiancée Katherine (Susanna Fielding), and when he despairs about marrying her due to his new appearance, she muses, “Simple. You’ll grow a mustache.” Cut to the title.
Yes, what first looks like the creakiest of ideas — opening with an “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”-style origin story — reveals itself as something even stupider: opening with an origin story for his mustache.
“Death on the Nile” is Branagh’s follow-up to his 2017 adaptation of “Murder on the Orient Express,” a bloodless, musty museum piece stuffed with stars but dull as toast. This sequel has become something of a cursed production, initially slated for release in late 2019, then delayed and rescheduled so many times that Branagh was able to write, direct, and release an entire additional film during its hiatus (one that has also delivered considerable PR dents to co-stars Armie Hammer and Letitia Wright).
That film took minor liberties with the source material; this one, again scripted by Michael Green, takes major ones. Aside from the aforementioned prologue, we have another set-up sequence, in which Branagh’s ornately-mustached super-sleuth visits a hip nightclub and observes, coincidentally enough, the formation of the love triangle at the center of the mystery to come; the recently engaged Jacqueline de Bellefort (Emma Mackey) introduces her fiancé Simon Doyle (Hammer) to her best friend, the wealthy heiress Linnet Ridgeway (Gal Gadot), only to watch as they seem to fall in love and lust with each other before her eyes, as well as Poirot’s. He also enjoys a performance by Salome Otterbourne (Sophie Okonedo), a Black jazz and blues singer (the character is a white romance novelist in the novel).
Six weeks later, vacationing on the river Nile, Poirot runs into his old pal Bouc (Tom Bateman) – a holdover from the previous film but not this novel, gotta get that crossover continuity — and, long story short, he ends up on a pleasure cruise for the honeymooning Linnet and Simon, a handful of their guests, and, eventually, Jacqueline, the gatecrasher. Shortly thereafter, Linnet is murdered, and everyone seems to have a motive (“When you have money, no one is ever really your friend,” she tells Poirot), so he investigates, interrogates, makes proclamations, and eventually lands at the moment we’ve all been waiting for: the big scene of all of them in one room, eyeing each other suspiciously, as the master detective unmasks the killer among them.
One of the most puzzling aspects of Branagh’s star-studded Christie movies, considering what a fine actor he is (and, for a long while, what a reliable actors’ director he was) is the generally poor quality of the performances. Hammer and Gadot are both quite bad — unconvincing accents, thin characterizations, voids of charisma — and much of the rest of the cast flails. (Even Annette Bening has some phony moments. Annette Bening!) Coming out surprisingly unscathed is a low-key and effective Russell Brand, while the onscreen reunion of Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders (who play all their scenes together) is something even Branagh can’t screw up. And credit where due: he makes a fine Poirot, and a somehow credible one, even with that outrageous accent.
Patrick Doyle’s score is sensational, doing a lot of the heavy lifting mood-wise, and Haris Zambarloukos’ cinematography is sleek and stylish (both are longtime Branagh collaborators). Branagh and Zambarloukos know how to shoot movie stars like they’re movie stars, which is something of a lost art, and that big musical nightclub number, while narratively gratuitous, is plenty of fun (and plenty sexy). But Branagh also cannot keep his damn camera still, and the aesthetic eventually grates; he keeps throwing the camera around, it seems, solely to create the illusion of excitement.
But, as a director, he cannot pick a lane. All of that sweaty hyperactivity slams up against his insistence on milking the pathos of a particular death late in the film for all it’s worth — for more than it’s worth, fixing the camera on himself as he grieves, teary-eyed and shaky-voiced as if this is “Manchester by the Sea” or something. It takes itself with such unearned solemnity that its sparse, remaining sense of fun is drained.
“Death on the Nile” was given the starry-eyed big screen treatment before, as one of the cycle of late ‘70s and early ‘80s Christie movies that Rian Johnson pinpointed as a major influence on his “Knives Out.” And it’s hard not to feel a touch of secondhand embarrassment for Branagh when viewing that film, which came out between these; it’s a film in the spirit of Christie that ate his own, official adaptations for lunch. Its snappy pace and tightly wound energy should have been obvious goals for Branagh as well, but they seem increasingly out of his reach. This wasn’t always so — revisiting his “Dead Again” recently, I was struck by its nimbleness and its playfulness, its sense of delightful discovery in both the wild turns of the story and the operatic possibilities of the filmmaking. It has, in other words, everything missing from “Death on the Nile,” a film that drags its feet when they should be fleet. [C-]