Nile Blues

Death on the Nile (2022) is a worthy follow-up to the first Kenneth Branagh Poirot, and the Poirot tradition in general. It is stylish, cosmopolitan, colonialist, and filled with glamorous stars of today and yesteryear. But it does have the modern failing of trying to explain every damn detail of the protagonists backstory.

It starts during WWI, in black and white. A clean-shaven Lt. Poirot (Branagh) and his company are ordered by their mustachioed captain to take a bridge from the Bosch. Poirot comes up with a clever strategy, but his captain is killed by a booby trap, and Poirot is left with facial scars. His fiancee, a field nurse, makes light of it, and tells him to grow a mustache to cover them up.

Jump to "present day" - sometime between the wars. Poirot is at a fancy nightclub watching Sophie Okonedo sing the blues like Sister Rosetta Tharpe. He also notices his old friend (from the last movie), Tom Bateman, who is courting Letitia Wright, Okonedo's niece and manager. We get to see Emma Mackey introduce fabulously wealthy Gal Gadot to her boyfriend, Armie Hammer. And so on.

When we next meet them, they are in Egypt. Brand has dumped Mackey for Gadot, and they are going to party up and down the Nile. But Mackey keeps showing up, like a ghost at the feast. So they charter a river boat and take off. But Mackey finds her way on board and shoots Hammer in the leg. While all this is going on, Gadot is found killed. It is up to Poirot to find out whodunnit.

The settings are glamorous and appropriately colonialist. The riverboat has huge glass windows, although we see less through them then you might expect. The glamorous cast includes Annette Benning as Batman's snobby mother, Jennifer Saunders has Gadot's grandmother with Dawn French as her companion (and secret lover), Russell Brand as the charitable physician Gadot used to love, and who knows how many else. The blues gospel of Rosetta Tharpe and Okonedo's performance bring a little soul to the proceedings, and Letita Wright is always welcome.

Overall, a lovely bit of fluff. I think I even understand the murder. And I can even forgive the mustache.