Death On The Nile
Starring Hercule Poirot, along with Tom Bateman (also returning from the first film), Annette Bening, Russell Brand, Ali Fazal, Dawn French, Gal Gadot, Armie Hammer, Rose Leslie, Emma Mackey, Sophie Okonedo, Jennifer Saunders, and Letitia Wright
Directed by Kenneth Branagh
Rating: *** ½
Disclaimer: This review does not judge Armie Hammer
It is astonishing how personal some supposedly dispassionate reviewers get when it comes to sexual transgressions. Armie Hammer has been accused of lurid activities on his phone and that was one of the main reasons why the release of this exquisite Agatha Christie adaptation was delayed by more than a year.
Exquisite , it is by all means. The sumptuous ocean-view of a cruiser on the River Nile as it sails some choppy murderous waters in 1937, is unmistakably a feast to the eyes and pleasure for those who like their murder mysteries glamorous and inflated.
The very distinguished British actor-director Kenneth Branagh is no stranger to Agatha Christie and her flamboyant Belgian detective Hercule Poirot whose bloated selfesteem can only be compared with his ability to crack the most impossible murder cases with the welter of a whip , the swish of a knife and the sound of a gunshot on a dark chilling night when avaricious adventurers are abroad.
Such is the steamy simmering scenario. Branagh’s version of Christie conceals the periodicity and plays up the timeless emotions of jealousy, possessiveness and acrimony with a delectable appetite for glamour and seduction.
Branagh who has done Christie earlier with much success , has this chosen to focus on goodlooking faces(at one point that gorgeous Gal Gadot is dressed up as Cleopatra), gleaming surfaces and lingering luminous shots of the Egyptian pyramids captured as poetry in commotion by cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos whose black-and-white cinematography in the recent Belfast is a feast to the sigh.
There is some black-and-white at the start of Death On The Nile when we get a rather tragi-comic pre-face on how Hercule Poirot got that mythical moustache. But b & w is clearly not the chosen palate in Death On The Nile. The gorgeous outdoors and the murderous interiors of the characters’s sullen sullied hearts needed a concentrated colour palate.
The mood is passionate, the frames splashy but tasteful. I am so glad I saw this classily vivacious whodunit in a movie theatre. To see it at home is to miss the sheer physical beauty that the film celebrates. Populated by goodlooking suspects—Gal Gadot,Armie Hammer, Tom Bateman , Emma MacKay and our own Ali Fazal(in a not-too-miniscule role)—and armed with a whole lot of sophisticates tea parties and witty repartees, Death On The Nile is comfortably one of the handsomest Agatha Christie adaptations on the big screen.
The payoff may be predictable for those whose have read the novel recently. I had long forgotten it. But I had not forgotten how extravagantly theatrical the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot can be. Kenneth Barnagh nudges awake our most amiable memories of the conceited sleuth. As leading man and director, Branagh scores very highly. You may be able to guess ‘whodunit’. But you will never be able to second-guess how Branagh brings so much gravitas into the lives of such rich indolent shallow people ,some of whom deserve to be killed.