On vacation in Egypt, Detective Hercule Poirot joins a group of aristocrats going on a Nile cruise, including handsome heiress Linnet Ridgeway (Gal Gadot) and her new husband Simon Doyle (Armie Hammer) ‘stolen’ from her best friend Jacqueline (Emma Mackey). But there are murders on board and Poirot returns to service.
Posted yesterday at 10:30 a.m.
In 2017, we came out of a screening of the film The crime of the Orient Express of Kenneth Branagh with the impression of having seen an unfinished, unfinished work. The same feeling inhabits us with this new version of Death on the Nile inspired by Agatha Christie’s novel adapted as much to cinema as to TV and video games.
It’s not that it’s bad. On the contrary, the first half of the film is interspersed with charming large-scale scenes. Charged, moving, dizzying, they remind us how much cinema is an art that is experienced in theaters, on the big screen.
Unfortunately, in the second half, the film shifts (inevitably) into an agreed, boring and badly put together quasi-camera on board the SS shipKarnak where Poirot returns to service as the violent deaths add up. The plot having taken a long time to set up, the outcome is precipitous and disappointing.
Obviously, we cannot change the investigative methods of this dear Poirot, who is stoic, observant, thoughtful and has a few sympathetic OCDs. But this gives passages with little thickness.
Ironically, the best scene of the film is the very first one which, set in the middle of the First World War, is very reminiscent of the first minutes of the feature film 1917 by Sam Mendes. Just after, the introduction of the main characters, during a dance party in London in 1937, is just as invigorating, spectacular, vitaminized.
This excellent start is followed by a series of shots in the form of postcards with sumptuous Egyptian decorations in which several renowned actors (Annette Bening, Tom Bateman, Jennifer Saunders) are sprinkled in roles that are not always up to them.
Did we want to do too much? Probably. The result ? Unequal. To be classified in the good entertainment to see in the room, this Death on the Nile probably won’t go down in history.
Presented in theaters in English and dubbed in French
THRILLER
Death on the Nile (VF: Death on the Nile)
Kenneth Branagh
With Kenneth Branagh, Gal Gadot, Emma Mackey
2:07 a.m.