"It takes two."
Hello everyone!
No, seriously, we do.
You may have noticed that this blog features works by Agatha Christie rather often, and that's on purpose given that I thoroughly enjoy anything and everything that woman has ever written.
So when there are adaptations, you can bet I'll be somewhere close, or at least not far behind!
I'm a sucker for a good murder mystery, okay?
That said, I wasn't that much of a sucker for Kenneth Branagh's remake of Murder on the Orient Express, but I wanted to give this sequel to it a go because ... well, I'm a glutton for punishment.
And it wasn't even TOO bad, overall, if not for the blasted ending.
Hold on to your hats, we're taking a cruise through Egypt in Death on the Nile!
I don't really want to lose more words over this, so let's just jump straight into it, shall we?
The movie begins with a flashback to the fighting during WWI when Poirot (Branagh) saves his squad and figures out the perfect way to advance at the same time, only to have his captain trip a trap and he ends up at the hospital with scars on his face. His fiancée smiles and says he'll just grow a mustache.
Flash-foward and we're in the UK where for some reason people are pretending to have sex on the dance floor or dancing, I can't tell which it is, and we meet Jackie who introduces her fiancé Simon (Armie Hammer, whose role and screen time has been SIGNIFICANTLY cut, let me tell you), to her best friend Linnet (Gadot), who just so happens to be filthy rich.
More sex-dancing later and Poirot is in Egypt where he runs into his old friend Bouc from the previous movie, and is introduced to his tyrant of a mother before being dragged off to attend a wedding party of none other than Simon and Linnet.
Yep, Simon ditched Jackie, but she isn't ready to ditch him as she crashes the party because, somehow she can just waltz into the reception even though it's private and guests-only, but it turns out she's been following the couple everywhere and Linnet's nerves are at wits end.
Poirot advises them to go home, and Linnet is all for it, but Simon convinces her to continue, so she charters a steamboat for the whole party and they sail along the Nile to visit some wonderful sites along the way.
This is also where Linnet and Simon almost get squashed by a chunk of temple, and where Jackie once again weasels her way onto the ship, but for some reason can't just be kicked off, so she has to stay.
Naturally this becomes a bigger problem against the backdrop of Bouc pining for Rosalie, niece of the blues singer that's along for entertainment, and whom his mother apparently despises, as well as revelations that everyone in the wedding party is a bit suss.
Not as suss as Poirot being unable to handle a glass of champagne, Jackie shooting Simon in the leg, going into hysterics, and the morning discovery that Linnet was shot in the head during the night.
Now in his element, Poirot begins questioning the passengers and it turns out everyone has a somewhat motive to do away with Linnet for some reason or other, but he's a pretty bad detective because when he's interviewing Linnet's maid with Simon and Bouc, the poor girl later winds up dead and yet he doesn't make the connection that only one of the three men in the room could have arranged for it.
Anyway, he instead reveals to Bouc that he's been on an assignment for his mother to check out Rosalie, whom he holds in highest esteem, etc. But he also needs to finally question Bouc.
And poor Bouc croaks when he's shot in the neck. (There's a subplot of him stealing Linnet's necklace to be free of his tyrannical mother, but it's literally unimportant considering he's dead as a doornail.)
By this point though, it's evident the murderer is definitely one of the group and through bits of testimony - though ten thousand of them missing - Poirot reveals that actually, Jackie never shot Simon in the leg. She and Simon concocted the plan to get Linnet's money, so when everyone was with Jackie, Simon ran off to shoot Linnet, then shot HIMSELF in the leg to make things authentic. He stole red paint from Bouc's mother to make it seem like blood was oozing out of his "wound", too.
The maid saw him entering the room and made the connection, then tried to blackmail them, so Simon sent Jackie a message and she slit the poor girl's throat.
As for Bouc, well, somehow Simon either got Jackie to come watch because he was worried, or Jackie just turned clairvoyant or something, and she shot Bouc before he could reveal he'd seen her with the maid.
The story ends with Jackie shooting Simon through his back and the bullet goes through her heart as well (melodramatic, too many bones in the way for such a small caliber of .22), so they both die, and five bodies are carted off the boat when they all disembark.
In the end, we finish in the same club where they do the sex-dance, and Poirot is there to listen to Rosalie's aunt sing again (woman chased him all movie long, at that), and the proprietor doesn't recognize him because ... he shaved his mustache.
The end.
ARGH.
Listen, I was okay with the story, as the core remains the same - though how Poirot got to the end result is a bit suss because no one heard running along the deck, and no one heard something splash into the Nile to add weight to the theory of people moving about fast. There's lots of facts that are too obvious - when Simon is assuring Linnet they can't kick Jackie off because she had a ticket, for a pre-booked steamboat at that, for one - but I lived with it.
They didn't suddenly take other Christie characters from different stories and shove them in, but adapted characters to what was already in the penned story, just tweaked them a little, which was fine.
It was dramatic because apparently, Branagh doesn't trust the audience to enjoy the psychology behind the murder, which was Christie's metier, but I can excuse it. I was going to give the movie a C+ which, in contrast to the D- of Express, was a vast improvement.
Then they went and chopped his lip hair off.
This is where I know Branagh is literally lying when he says he's read all the Poirot books, because if he HAD, then he would know Poirot would never, under any circumstances, shave his mustache willingly. He also never wanted to be a farmer, but that's a minor point. Branagh is shifting and changing canon to suit his own desire for melodrama, to the detriment of a much-loved character who EXISTS to be vain, dandified, and impossible to stomach.
Hercule Poirot as a person would have been horrible to have around. But the point of him is that he's someone people don't take seriously - that's half his battle already won.
And his mustache is just as much a symbol of that as his mincing walk.
So for that alone, this is a complete fail for me and deserves a big, fat F, even if I was convinced this would be an improvement from the previous one.
Help us, David Suchet, you're our only hope!
xx
*images and video not mine
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