Review by Nicholas Porteous for Mr. Will Wong
In Death On The Nile – Kenneth Branagh’s followup to 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express – Inspector Poirot is back, and he has a metric ton of bland character motivations to convey before the inevitable murder! If you saw Murder On The Orient Express – or perhaps even just the Trailer for Murder and now Nile, as I did – you know what you’re signing-up for: a cavalcade of stars and character actors, all with something to gain from murder, gathering together on an enclosed mode of transport, one of them murdering, and Poirot uncovering the identity of the killer. If that’s all you’re looking for, Nile certainly delivers those plot elements gradually over its 127-minute runtime. Unfortunately, the Screenplay is so concerned with feeding us exposition – both before and after the titular Death – that it leaves-out any reason to care. On the contrary, it expects us to invest in characters that, from what little we know of them, are pretty despicable regardless of whether they’ve killed anyone.
Gal Gadot and Armie Hammer are rich newlyweds who got together under bizarre circumstances and have come to expect applause every time they enter a room and very publicly make-out. They are surrounded by former lovers, resentful employees, frenemies and straight-up nemeses. Rather than humanizing anyone directly, Death On The Nile often opts for more straightforward explanations, essentially puncturing the Fourth Wall with voiceover as we tilt and pan across a room of social fraudsters, theoretically there to ‘celebrate the marriage’. The real mystery is why anyone would pretend to like this couple. At one point Gadot sits on a tall ladder in a gigantic smock wearing an Egyptian headband, waiting for her passengers to board, and whispers something about being consumed by ancient desires. They all applaud even though there’s no way they heard her, and she’s not really doing anything – aside from meta-priming us for her forthcoming Cleopatra Biopic.
After a little over an hour of making sure the audience is hip to why murder is about to go down, it’s finally murder time! And since there’s nothing else to be invested in, Death On The Nile is practically begging us to speculate about Whodunnit. I don’t consider myself a great detective, or even a great movie detective. I’ve been dead-wrong about predicting twists in the past. In this case, I had more or less figured out what was going on (minus a couple of details) within about 10 minutes of the crime. With an hour remaining I still had a few chances to wonder whether I was doing exactly what Branagh was hoping I’d do, but alas, I’ve rarely been so disappointed to be completely right. Bereft of distractions like compelling characters, dazzling dialogue, or a twisty-turny tale, Death On The Nile is more or less a simple guessing game of a movie, and because I was able to put the pieces together with minimal effort, I can only appraise it as a slow-moving failure.
20th Century Studios Canada release DEATH ON THE NILE Friday, February 11, 2022.
*Please exercise caution observing Covid-19 protocols if seeing this in-theatre*
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