Great news! A screenplay doesn’t have to be written by a computer program to feel like it was written by a computer program.

Death on the Nile (2022)

There’s plenty of good stuff in Death on the Nile (2022). Kenneth Branagh’s take on Hercule Poirot continues to be fun and elastic. Annette Bening plays a rich lady who is also a painter who is also an asshole. Someone shoots Armie Hammer. But it’s really the movie’s problems that make for the more interesting read, because while this movie’s problems are not many, they are incandescently fucking weird.

There’s too much movie in this movie! It makes me suspicious, there is so much movie in this movie. I feel like this movie is hiding something, deep inside of all that movie. If one day your friend told you that he was definitely not the serial killer known as the Bone Bandit, and he in no way coveted your bones, certainly not to construct some kind of large and terrible bone temple, you would immediately and justifiably think, “my friend is probably the Bone Bandit. My bones are in grave danger.”

Listen: someone reviewed the script to Death on the Nile and thought to themselves, “this is an absolute clunker, this fucker right here,” which is correct. Unfortunately, this person continued thinking, arriving at the significantly less correct, “we can fix this movie by inserting into it every idea ever birthed by the mind of man.”

It is in the marriage of these two thoughts and their wildly differing correctnesses that we are given a Nile that’s about as uncanny as the valley gets:

We’ve got a picture shot on 65-millimeter, but with nearly every frame soiled by unnecessary digital effects. All the compositional resplendence and rich visual palette of Old Hollywood, and when Emma Mackey sashays up the ship’s deck at sundown it looks like there’s a level from Crash Bandicoot playing behind her. I want Dr. Cortex to be stopped as much as the next guy, and much respect to anyone who can 100% a single game in that fucking series, but my eyes deserve better; my soul deserves more.

And there’s the digital de-aging, whose every appearance in a movie makes me fear that I might have accidentally solved the LeMarchand Configuration and been sent to a highly specific corner of the Cenobite dimension where the highest form of pleasure is making people frown. Branagh is made computer-young in a World War I flashback, one that serves no narrative purpose other than to show that Poirot was also clever when he was a sprat. This seems like meager recompense for having to gaze upon an impossibly smooth Young Branagh, one seemingly sculpted entirely from a grim, unspeakable wax.

Anyhoo, around the time you manage to purge Uncanny Branagh from your mind’s eye, you’ll start to notice that this movie about impossibly wealthy white people doing extremely douchey things has a blues soundtrack. Backing away from this one, not feeling bad about it.

The inciting incident for this movie happens halfway through this movie, which seems like a strange place to begin the events of a movie.

There’s also a Mexican standoff. At least I think there is a Mexican standoff. A bunch of characters point guns at each other during the film’s climax, a decision whose hilarious randomness is only topped by their collective decision, moments later, to stop having a Mexican standoff. We all make mistakes, I guess.

The End

I like this movie. That’s a lie. This movie sucks. But I appreciate it, because Death on the Nile fails in the interesting ways movies used to fail in back when things like effort and creativity were considered givens, and not special storytelling treats that the audience should be grateful for.

Yes, the holes in the script are many, and haphazardly plugged with scraps of paper from a box labeled Things That Sometimes Happen in a Movie, but at least someone involved in whipping up this grim honker of a turkey was engaged enough to realize something was wrong, and sincere enough to try and fix it. Seriously, if the greatest contribution that Death on the Nile can make to The Discourse is to show us that the best computer program will only ever be as smart as the weirdest human, then I can at least be grateful for the movie’s existence. You might not be my friend, Nile, but you’re the enemy of my enemy, and that’s close enough.