Death on the Nile is a good old-fashioned mess of a movie
polygon.comEvery franchise has its iconography. Batman has those pointy ears on his cowl, the sleek car, the Bat-Signal. Jurassic Park has the mosquito in amber and the clever velociraptors. Hercule Poirot? He’s got a fancy mustache, one that has appeared in numerous films, television series, and stage plays. Agatha Christie’s beloved detective isn’t a synonym for mysteries and solving them in the same way Sherlock Holmes is, but his brand? It’s strong.
That brand was also on the brink of a comeback. Kenneth Branagh’s 2017 film Murder on the Orient Express, perhaps the best-known of Christie’s novels to feature the mustachioed detective, was a sleeper hit, with a $352 million box-office gross on a $55 million budget. Branagh himself stars as Poirot, and surrounds himself with a star-studded cast, including Daisy Ridley, Willem Dafoe, Josh Gad, Judi Dench, and others — all packaged in a marketing campaign smothered in Imagine Dragons.
Like Batman Begins, Murder on the Orient Express ended with a sequel tease, in this case promising “a murder on the bloody nile,” signaling that Branagh would adapt Christie’s Death on the Nile next. Then COVID-19 threw that plan into chaos. Originally scheduled for release during the 2019 holiday season, but delayed extensively due to the pandemic, Death on the Nile has arrived two years later than planned, and it’s a stranger film for it. While the film sat complete and its studio hoped for a profitable wide release, its cast accrued a number of PR disasters ranging in severity, including Letitia Wright’s alleged anti-vax messaging, Gal Gadot’s controversial stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict, and most notably, troubling and bizarre allegations of abuse and sexual coercion levied against Armie
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