Death on the Nile
For all its exotic splendour and funny accents, Agatha Christie’s whodunit cannot escape a certain dullness and a lack of suspense.
Bad dogs and Englishmen: Armie Hammer and Gal Gadot
Just as James Bond gained a new humanity in No Time to Die, so Kenneth Branagh attempts to enrich the emotional backstory of Hercule Poirot. In fact, no whodunit to date can surely boast such a stunning prologue, in which we meet the young Hercule in the trenches near Ypres, on 31 October 1914. With a full-scale recreation of a First World War battlefield, the sequence – in glorious monochrome – establishes both the ingenuity and the physical and mental scars acquired by the Belgian mastermind. But Death on the Nile remains a whodunit, and it is the most difficult genre to render spontaneous. For all the crafty narrative shadings of the original author, Agatha Christie, her characters will always be mechanised and devious – and capable of homicide.
Here, Branagh, as director, exercises his own legerdemain with astonishing scenes of Giza, with one drone shot alone seeming to render a pyramid hollow and then solid in a single move. The director’s other visual preoccupation is the beastly goings-on beneath the surface calm of the Nile, where we witness piscine murder prior to the camera emerging into the sun-baked diorama of jazz, bubbly and old friends. But in the words of the beautiful heiress Linnet Ridgeway (Gal Gadot): “When you have money, nobody is ever really your friend.” And how right she is. But then she has run off with her former soulmate’s fiancé Simon Doyle (Armie Hammer), probably because he is the only cast member significantly taller than she. And so a gaggle of colourful individuals – hand-picked for their possible grudges – joins Simon and Linnet to celebrate their new-found love. “Ah, love – it is not safe,” volunteers Poirot, who is neither good on boats or champagne and reveals to one passenger the burden of his own romantic past. He is not himself – although his observational skills are no less blunted.
A production plagued with problems, including plague and cannibalism, Death on the Nile arrives gasping for air. The original release date of 20 December 2019 was delayed because of “production issues,” then pushed back a further 26 months due to the pandemic, enough time to allow Disney to excise Armie Hammer’s appearance in the film’s trailers and TV commercials. Following the actor’s apparent fondness for cannibalism revealed on Instagram – and former lovers condemning his abusive behaviour and threats to chew their bodies and suck their blood – Hammer was dropped from several film projects. Thus, a black cloud hung over Death on the Nile and its initial performance at the box-office has been disappointing. Nonetheless, it is a pictorially intoxicating affair, embellished with a jolly blizzard of amusing accents (Annette Bening tries out her British brogue again, Jennifer Saunders plays an American) and a punctilious turn from Kenneth Branagh himself as the OCD sleuth who, like Linnet Ridgeway, would seem to have no true friends. For all his bonhomie and genteel manners, he cannot but suspect all his comrades of homicide.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Tom Bateman, Annette Bening, Kenneth Branagh, Russell Brand, Ali Fazal, Dawn French, Gal Gadot, Armie Hammer, Rose Leslie, Emma Mackey, Sophie Okonedo, Jennifer Saunders. Letitia Wright, Susannah Fielding.
Dir Kenneth Branagh, Pro Ridley Scott, Kenneth Branagh, Judy Hofflund and Kevin J. Walsh, Ex Pro Simon Kinberg, Screenplay Michael Green, Ph Haris Zambarloukos, Pro Des Jim Clay, Ed Úna Ní Dhonghaíle, Music Patrick Doyle, Costumes Paco Delgado, Dialect coach Daniele Lydon.
Kinberg Genre/Mark Gordon Pictures/Scott Free Productions/TSG Entertainment-Walt Disney Studios.
127 mins. UK/USA. 2020. UK and US Rel: 11 February 2022. Cert. 12A.
