Death on the Nile

Directed by Kenneth Branagh, Death on the Nile follows master detective Hercule Poirot (Branagh) as he’s forced to once again spring into action after a murder is committed aboard a luxury cruise liner. Filmmaker Branagh, working from Michael Green’s screenplay, kicks Death on the Nile off with a silly yet entertaining pre-credits stretch that essentially functions as an origin story for Poiriot’s mustache (!), as the tongue-in-cheek, appreciatively absurd bent of this prologue is hardly indicative of the deliberate and woefully uneventful narrative that eventually succeeds it – with the movie eventually progressing into a meandering midsection that spins its wheels to an almost excruciating degree (ie the first murder doesn’t occur until well past the halfway mark!) The arms-length atmosphere is compounded by an assortment of characters that are, for the most part, hardly as interesting or compelling as Branagh obviously believes, which is surprising, to say the least, given that the director has assembled a roster of such charismatic performers as Armie Hammer, Russell Brand, Annette Bening, and Sophie Okonedo. (Even Poirot himself comes off as underwhelmingly one-note, with Branagh’s often indecipherable French accent doing little to allay this feeling.) And although the movie’s second half is peppered with a very small handful of engaging sequences, Death on the Nile has long-since cemented its place as a padded-out misfire that wears out its welcome long before arriving at its far-from-electrifying climax.

*1/2 out of ****