‘Death on the Nile’ Film Review: Kenneth Branagh’s 2nd Poirot Outing Makes for a Plusher Puzzler

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accused of sexual assault and rape.) There are plenty of other reasons to wish the perfectly watchable “Death” had been better, if only because it’s already an upgrade from the flat, purposeless “Express.” This one’s trappings are plusher, its puzzle and solution niftier, yet still not totally there as a smoothly glamorous, engrossing piece of escapism.Christie aficionados may wonder what a grey WWI prologue in Belgium’s blood-soaked trenches has to do with Mediterranean misadventure.

But Branagh and Green believe, a tad obnoxiously, that Poirot is more interesting if he’s less comical oddball and more heavy-headed hero with a lost love.

Even the mustache gets a tragic origin story, because, in the world of IP, famous facial hair has a past. It’s a bit much, and hardly the amuse-bouche one wants for a meal of sleek sleuthing.Cut to 1937, and a hopping London nightclub, where flashy heiress Linnet Ridgeway (Gal Godot) is asked by her old school chum Jacqueline (Emma Mackey, “Sex Education)) to give Jacqui’s fiancée Simon Doyle (Hammer) a job so the madly-in-love pair can get their footing in life.

Bad move. Weeks later at an opulent Egyptian hotel, it’s Linnet and Simon celebrating their nuptials, well-wishers in tow, while jilted Jacqui plays the disrupter, stalking the couple on their honeymoon to Linnet’s increasing concern.The simultaneously vacationing Poirot is enlisted to intervene in this love triangle, just in time for two-thirds of it to lie bleeding from gunshot wounds on the SS Karnak.