Review: The long-delayed 'Death on the Nile' runs aground

Kenneth Branagh's “Death on the Nile" is making its humbled way into theaters this Friday

Kenneth Branagh's Agatha Christie adaptation “Death on the Nile” begins with a flashback to the trenches of World War I before shifting to 1930s London two decades later, but that’s nothing compared to the time that's passed since Branagh's preceding 2017 whodunit “Murder on the Orient Express.”

That film, which packed a bevy of stars aboard an opulent locomotive, was a saggy contrivance that lacked the warm fizz of Sidney Lumet's 1974 version, with Albert Finney. But “Murder on the Orient” did offer a welcome reminder of two immutable cinematic maxims: Train movies are irresistible and whodunits are, generally speaking, a hoot. It was an unexpected box-office hit, and a sequel, with Branagh again directing and returning as the mustachioed Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, was quickly ordered up with visions of something like a Christie-verse.

But the pandemic, which partly accounts for release postponements stretching two years, is not all that has delayed “Death on the Nile.” One of its stars, Armie Hammer, plunged into scandal, and the studio reportedly considered reshooting the film with another actor. Even the studio disappeared when 20th Century Fox was acquired by the Walt Disney Co.

Still, the biggest sea change to swamp “Death on the Nile” may have been something else: Rian Johnson's “Knives Out" kind of blew it out the water. Johnson's 2019 mystery wasn't based on a Christie novel, but it was affectionately styled after one, and giddily brought the genre into contemporary times. Here, with Daniel Craig as the very Poirot-like investigator Benoit Blanc, was the exciting whodunit revival. (A Mediterranean-set sequel is due out later this year.)