REVIEW:
A fine, yet forgettable film, they just can’t seem to get these Agatha Christie – Hercule Poirot movies right. It’s a real shame too, because the stories are great and the casting generally seems to be pretty good. But the stories seem like they must be hard to translate to film, because they just seem to be loaded up with a ton of suspects, each with a different potential motive for being the killer, and a detective who has to go around trying to piece it all together.
As far as the two movies go (the first one being Murder on the Orient Express, which also starred Kenneth Branagh as detective Poirot,) Death on the Nile is the better. That’s because unlike Orient Express, where the movie took place on a train, you never felt the claustrophobia of being on that train, or like you were really in a foreign city, on vacation, when these horrific things happened. Here, in Nile, you do feel like you are on the ship. And you do feel the vacation aspect, with the characters getting off to sight see every now and again. But the formula here seems way too simple, with each character having a motive that gets uncovered as the movie goes on. The story does give us a reason for this, by the end, but at that point it’s too little, too late.