Death on the Nile (2022)
The fatal flaw of this movie is its bloat. A death by bloat-ation. Whether Death on the Nile suffers from filmmaking hubris or inevitable studio sequel-itis, I am not entirely sure.
Agatha Christie adaptations should be lean. This allows for the story to be told at pace, which means audiences will be frantically chasing to catch up to the detective. Without a leanness to the narrative, audiences will wander and ponder and then ultimately solve the case fairly easily (as with this movie). And once audiences have solved the case, they grow disinterested. The storytelling tension dissipates and consequently drains into the depths of the Nile with a whimpery splash.
Flaw #1: Bloat
- a. The War Opening
C’mon, dude! Why was this necessary? What did this actually unearth about the Hercule Poirot character? The idea of introducing a tragic love interest for Poirot may seem interesting, but the romance is not compelling if nobody ever sees any of it! For the gamble to work, the movie needs to pull some inspiration from The English Patient. Otherwise, it’s just considered bloated laziness.
Bonus: Even though I sincerely and ardently support cutting this part of the movie, it definitely has some haunting visuals.
- b. The Second Opening (aka the dance opening)
If a story requires a second prologue, then that means the beginning is structurally broken…or just plain bloated. The dance sequence is overly stretched, hammering audiences mercilessly over the head with the burgeoning love triangle. Centering a story on a love triangle is not novel, but for some peculiar reason, the filmmakers want to convince you that it absolutely is. A sensual dance scene between two leads makes sense when either: 1) an audience knows enough about the two characters to be invested in their relationship, or 2) an audience has a history with the actual actors behind the two characters (such as in 2005’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith). Using a dance as an opening to a story is fine. But it becomes exhausting and unwarranted when it overstays its initial welcome.
The result of these back-to-back openings means the movie takes too long to get into motion. A proper whodunnit should build momentum in order to crest into an epic, revealing thrill. If you read the plot section of the Wikipedia article of this movie, you’ll notice it takes THREE paragraphs before the characters are on the cruise ship where the main action takes place. The dawdling feels depressingly aimless.
Flaw #2: Miscasting
The movie is boldly and intentionally miscast…I hope. Otherwise, I have no clue why certain actors are in this movie in oddly-defined roles. True to form, the Gal Gadot character elicits no sympathy. I am not sure why I am supposed to connect with her boring character, Linnet. The script offers no reason to care about her or her troubles.
The rest of the casting is also messy. Rose Leslie is playing a (French?) maid. Not sure why. Russell Brand is playing Gal Gadot’s former lover with such a smoldering seriousness. Seems like a waste of his comedic charisma. It’s difficult to distinguish between Jennifer Saunders’s and Dawn French’s characters (maybe that is the point?). And Tom Bateman has a stretch in the middle of the movie where he essentially becomes forgotten (like watching Andrew Wiggins play in a third quarter). The only actor who seems to understand the tone Branagh is gunning for is Emma Mackey. She’s exceptionally delightful.
Additionally, there is a scene after the double openings when Poirot arrives in Egypt and chats with his friend, Bouc, who provides a poorly performed dump of information about all of the supporting characters. The exposition dump is genuinely hilarious because it is so ill-crafted. Why not do the character information dump when the passengers are boarding the cruise ship? That improves on just mindlessly listing everyone’s motives in a hotel lobby, while also shedding half an hour from the start of the movie.
Flaw #3: The look-and-feel
Recent film adaptations of 20th century novels share a certain ugliness to the cinematography. I can’t quite place it, but they seem to have a “digital sheen” that undermines the look-and-feel of setting a story in the 1930s-1950s. The shots feel underwhelmingly flat. There are attempts to showcase a wowness or epicness of scale, but they come across as jarring disappointments.
Examples besides this version of Death on the Nile include Rebecca (2020) and Deep Water (2022). The moves from 20th Century Fox to Disney for Death on the Nile and Deep Water may contribute to the lackluster visuals. It would certainly be nice for this trend to fade into obscurity. Hopefully, a third entry in this particular continuity never sees daylight, unless these flaws are fixed for the future.
