The only way this movie makes sense is if you have no problem waiting an hour for the inciting incident. Otherwise, it gets very repetitive. And that’s the biggest fault of Death on the Nile which takes away the engaging factor.
Death on the Nile is certainly a good, watchable film and one that is safe for family viewing. Although, the visuals are actually bad and completely feel CGI. The story is nothing spectacular in the excitement of a whodunnit that normally one expects and is rather very predictable. This is just an old-fashioned detective outing and no harm in that. Kenneth Branagh, who has a buzz around him with his Oscar win doesn’t shine to his potential but you’d feel that he is on his way to directing more crime thrillers.
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Obviously, if you take one hour to get to the inciting incident, then the film will feel slow and tedious and it does. Of course, you can take that long to establish characters but we fully understand character personalities by the 25th-30th minutes. And since we only have less than an hour left for the ‘fun and games’ section, the story just feels tiring. The final hour is actually good but by the time we get there, we have already lost interest. It became enjoyable once the murder took place but it felt like it took an awfully long time to get there. Despite the time spent with the various suspects because as I stated earlier, many scenes felt repetitive.
Overall, while I do not believe that this was an awful film, it is certainly no way near to being a great film nor is it anywhere close to being Keneth Branagh’s best film. There were some redeeming qualities to it such as the score for the movie and a highly paced second half, however, the plot as a whole was quite disappointing. I managed to figure out what was going on pretty quickly which just made me sad because I have never read the book. I came into this knowing nothing. I believe that Kenneth Branagh did his best by trying to convey his twist from the book but fell really short. Not bad just not rewatchable.
