Death on the Nile (★★☆☆☆) miscalculates from the start, marching into a mystery Christie herself showed no interest in exploring: the origins of Hercule Poirot’s trademark mustache.Director and star Kenneth Branagh, helming his second Christie adaptation following the 2017 hit Murder on the Orient Express, digs into a black-and-white, WWI-set prologue that firmly establishes Belgian sleuth Poirot as the film’s romantic hero.Christie’s sturdy plots and colorful characters certainly invite inventive reinterpretation, but it feels misguided making this or any Poirot story more about the man solving the mystery, than about the mystery that Poirot must solve.The sprightlier 1978 version of Death on the Nile, directed by John Guillermin and scripted by Sleuth playwright Anthony Shaffer, struck a more satisfying balance between the famous detective and the cast of suspects all harboring motives for murder.That whodunnit boasted a lineup of eccentric legends — Bette Davis, Angela Lansbury, Maggie Smith, David Niven, and, of course, Peter Ustinov as Poirot — inhabiting Dame Agatha’s larger-than-life characters while swooning about in Anthony Powell’s Oscar-winning ’30s-era costumes.The result was gloriously camp, as much as it was wickedly intriguing.
Breathtaking locations on and along the Nile provided immeasurable atmosphere, and Mia Farrow supplied livewire intensity as Jackie Bellefort, a socialite jilted by her fiancé Simon for her best friend Linnet.Branagh takes many liberties with the novel’s narrative, but sticks with the central plot of unstable Jackie stalking newlyweds Simon and Linnet all over Egypt during their honeymoon.However, while the earlier film had Farrow pulsating with wide-eyed madness as Jackie pops up.
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