Lame Poirot turns out to be Disappointment on the Nile

What! You just can’t do that!

If you are going to adapt an Agatha Christie for the big screen, your starting point – even allowing for the huge difference between book and film as media – has to be that essentially the Christie is enough. Death on the Nile is an absolute classic of the canon. The great Dame certainly didn’t need to do more than she did. She got it spot on. Plenty of Christie aficionados will argue that it is her greatest book.

And yet for director Kenneth Branagh – who also plays Poirot – somehow it wasn’t enough. The team behind this latest remake decided there was room for improvement.

Christie gives us a Poirot who was already an old man in 1920, a former Belgian police chief who came to England as a refugee during the First World War.

However Ken and the gang decide he was actually soldier during the war, saved most of his colleagues in a moment of deductive brilliance and yet still managed to get himself blown up – a prologue told to give us an explanation for his extravagant moustaches.

Eh? That’s surely part of his mystery.

And then the improvements kick in again in a prologue which gives us Poirot precisely as we were never meant to see him.

We go from the preposterous to the outrageous. Dame Agatha will be spinning in her grave – which is a shame given the years this particular film has been sitting on our pandemic-hit horizons.

Now it’s here, it will have us Christie anoraks steaming at the ears – quite apart from the fact that the basic storyline, the bit in the middle, somehow never quite manages to grip; in fact, it’s a film which in the end manages to make the solution seem faintly ridiculous.

Christie’s murderers so often seem to make the task so much more difficult for themselves than they need to with their obsessive over-planning – largely so as to set Poirot sufficiently satisfying a puzzle to unravel.

However, in this film, the solution comes across as rather bonkers even though it’s essentially as Christie wrote it. The difference is that the book wraps you up so tightly that you just don’t wonder why the killer would do this that and the other simply to achieve X, Y and Z.

Christie grips and so gets away with it. This film does neither.

Partly, it’s that the cast doesn’t gel. None of it is helped by the ghastly controversies in which Armie Hammer has subsequently become enmeshed; but even without them, he’s rather lame as Simon, the cad who ditches Jacqueline (Emma Mackey) for super-rich Linnet (Gal Gadot) instead.

Mackey and Gadot – while she lasts – are among the bright spots, as indeed is an oddly unrecognisable Russell Brand as the doctor.

But Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders are completely miscast as lady’s companion and wealthy socialite respectively. All you can see is French and Saunders; your every expectation is that they will lapse into spoof. Tom Bateman’s Bouc doesn’t ring true, and nor does Annette Bening’s Euphemia. A pretty disappointing evening.

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