These days — let us hope, for not too much longer — a movie has to be something special to lure an audience into a theater; something you just can't wait to see, something that would be diminished if watched on a screen at home. Unfortunately, Kenneth Branagh's "Death on the Nile" is not one of those movies. It's a perfectly serviceable entertainment, albeit one that's been hit with more than its share of bad luck: multiple delays of its original December 2020 release date, due to the pandemic and to sexual assault allegations against star Armie Hammer (who's been neatly reduced to blink-and-you'll-miss-him status in the movie's trailer). But it's just a little flat; like a party — remember those? — full of interesting guests that nonetheless has more than its share of awkward pauses.
As director and star, Branagh gets both the credit and the blame. He's a delight as Agatha Christie's famed Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, a portrayal first unveiled in Branagh's 2017 film "Murder on the Orient Express." Just the way he pronounces "vege-tables" is a feast, as is the way this meticulous gentleman carefully adjusts a corpse's legs so as to be more symmetrical, and fusses over the possibility of an odd number of desserts. The film even gives us a mustache origin story — Poirot's eely facial hair is a trademark — and a poignant romantic past.
But while I'd happily watch an entire movie purely about how Poirot became a detective in the first place, here we're focused mostly on a few days in 1937. In typical Christie fashion, an assortment of distinctive and elegantly dressed folk — among them a beautiful heiress (Gal Gadot), her brand-new husband (Hammer), a romantic rival (Emma Mackey), a jazz singer (Sophie Okonedo), Poirot's right-hand-man Bouc (Tom Bateman), Bouc's arch mother (Annette Bening), among others — assemble in the glamorous setting of Egypt (i.e. some hardworking British soundstages), on a posh yacht. Tensions are flared, eyebrows are raised, a gun is fired ... and just like that, somebody's dead, and Poirot needs to figure out whodunit.
