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This is an archive article published on February 11, 2022
Death on the Nile movie review: Gal Gadot film is a bit of a stretch, and Kenneth Branagh makes it worse
Death on the Nile movie review: With so many magnificent actors around, you just want Kenneth Branagh to get on with it. And wear a smaller moustache.
Gal Gadot and Ali Fazal in a still from Death on the Nile. (Photo: Instagram/Ali Fazal)
Death on the Nile movie cast: Kenneth Branagh, Gal Gadot, Annette Bening, Armie Hammer, Ali Fazal
Death on the Nile movie director: Kenneth Branagh
Death on the Nile movie rating: 3 stars
Kenneth Branagh gives Agatha Christie another shot with Death on the Nile. The setting is more breathtaking, the actors more gorgeous, the dresses more glamorous, there is love or the talk of it all around, all the time, and if not that, there are steamy suggestions of more carnal and, let’s admit it, pretty agreeable pleasures.
In fact, through its initial half, Death on the Nile is just the kind of Pyramids-scale ambition that should get us back to the movies post another brush with the pandemic. An heiress (Gadot) is on her honeymoon, and a party set against the majestic beauty of Egypt, among Rameses and his queens, sandstorms and kites on pyramids, is what she wants and what she gets.
When the party moves onto a boat with Branagh’s Poirot as guest, the luxury carries on, from lobster to caviar, and lives led lapping up sun, sand and servants.
It’s easy to not envy Gadot anything, even if she really should know better flaunting her wealth, beauty and a man she has stolen from a friend, like that. She is just too charming an actor. However, the feeling that it will all come to a crashing end hangs over that cruise precisely for this reason.
When you are rich, you are not safe from anyone, says her Linnet. And her fellow passengers who are either thwarted in love due to her or dependent on her wealth make up a nice and long, mixed suspect list.
If Linnet is a figure of enviable charm, it’s unfortunate that Hammer is her husband, with two lovely women hankering for him and who can’t keep their hands off him. Even without the scandal that now taints the golden boy, Hammer carries just too much good-looking greasy charm for two intelligent women to not see him for it.
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As Poirot, Branagh takes his time building up to his grand reveal, as bodies mount around him. If that’s a little bit of a stretch this time, Branagh makes it worse by again making the entire film about himself. From World War I heroics to lovelorn tragedy, there is nothing his Poirot isn’t capable of.
With so many magnificent actors around, especially Okenodo as the sizzling singer who is actually the one rocking this cruise, and Bennett who is miserably underused — not to forget Ali Fazal, who is the inexplicable Brown “cousin” in this incredibly White family — you just want Branagh to get on with it. And wear a smaller moustache.
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