Death on the Nile

Death on the Nile

Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot boards a glamorous river steamer with enough champagne to fill the Nile. But his Egyptian vacation turns into a thrilling search for a murderer when a picture-perfect couple’s idyllic honeymoon is tragically cut short.

  • Released: 2022-02-09
  • Runtime: 127 minutes
  • Genre: Crime, Drama, Mystery
  • Stars: Kenneth Branagh, Gal Gadot, Letitia Wright, Armie Hammer, Annette Bening, Ali Fazal, Sophie Okonedo, Tom Bateman, Emma Mackey, Dawn French, Rose Leslie, Jennifer Saunders, Russell Brand, Adam Garcia, Rick Warden, John Wolfe, George Jaques, Victor Alli, Jonah Rzeskiewicz, James Schofield, Susannah Fielding, Michael Rouse, Alaa Safi, Orlando Seale, Charlie Anson, Danny Hughes, Sam James Page, Eleanor de Rohan, Noel White, Niamh Lynch, Rosie Dwyer, Nari Blair-Mangat, Sid Sagar, Brenda-Jane Newhouse, Rhiannon Clements, Daniel Cook, Heider Ali, Hayat Kamille, Crispin Letts, Rachel Feeney, Sarah Eve, Aron Julius, Francis Lovehall, Stacy Abalogun, Naveed Khan, Katie Smale, Kemi Awoderu, Lauren Alexandra, Nikkita Chadha, Nadine Leon Gobet
  • Director: Kenneth Branagh
 Comments
  • davidallenxyz - 1 July 2024
    Slow and artificial with dreadful performances
    Branagh's second outing as Poirot fails to capture your attention until far too late, and is all the weaker for it.

    Far too much time is spent building up the background story with a variety of fantastical yet stagey set-pieces, which means that when the crime actually happens, you have already stopped paying attention.

    There then follows a rushed set of interviews with the suspects - all based on Poirot's powers of deduction rather than anything the audience has been able to infer from what they have seen on screen.

    The final reveal is handled well, with pace and drama. But the film is beyond saving by then.

    There are two critical problems with this film.

    The most obvious is the cast. Poor performances abound. Emma Mackey is the best by a mile. Branagh and Armie Hammer are tolerable. Gal Gadot, Annette Bening, Sophie Okonedo and Russell Brand are awful. Why hire an international cast and then ask them to do bad accents?

    The less obvious problem, but the one that is to blame for it's artificiality, is Covid. Clearly they had to film a huge amount of this on closed sets with greenscreen and CGI substituting for Egypt. It looks like a cheap computer game. These grand adventures need a realistic setting and Death on the Nile does not capture your imagination in any way.

    Peter Ustinov's adventure is far better. Watch that one instead.
  • benprichardsdotcom - 26 March 2024
    Thoroughly unforgettable
    British Reviewer.

    Firstly what a bloated and ostentatious cast. I don't think Russell Brand uttered a work until 40 minutes in - and it seemed really, really weird seeing him speak as an actor and not his YouTube persona. You see, Death on the Nile was filmed well before covid hysteria gripped the Western Hemisphere, when Brand was still an actor and not an activist. Let's not talk too much about Armie Hammer's sex crimes either!

    I don't know the plot of this particular Poirot story, but I did watch Brannagh's re-imagining of Murder on the Orient Express and A Haunting in Venice and this one is the worst of the three by a mile. Was Poirot really a fan of smoky, bluesy blues in Agatha Christies original texts? I don't know, but having just seen American Fiction the inclusion of Sophie Okonedo and Letitia Wright seems tokenistic, although both gave good performances.