Death on the Nile review: It's a slow boat for Kenneth Branagh and Co.

Death on the Nile cracks at least one cold case before the title credits roll: the source of Hercule Poirot's mustache. According to Kenneth Branagh — who has played Agatha Christie's famously fussy Belgian detective across two films now, and also directs — that thing that fans out from his upper lip like a proud winged walrus isn't just an accessory, it's a tragic tell.

Giving Poirot a backstory at all sounds almost renegade in the world of Christie, whose neatly contrived novels tend to take place in a perfect drawing-room vacuum. And Nile (in theaters Feb. 11) seems torn between honoring tradition and tweaking it: In a post-Knives Out world, is a movie like this meant to be a classic whodunit for the whole family, or something more deliberately meta and modern? Branagh mostly lands on the former: a sort of sumptuous dinner-theater redux studded with stray bits of caricature, camp, and many CG pyramids.

The plot generally moves at a ship's pace too, stately and unhurried: Post-mustache flashback, the story opens on a 1930s nightclub in Egypt, where the cash-poor but genetically blessed Jacqueline de Bellefort (Sex Education's Emma Mackey) and Simon Doyle (Armie Hammer, probably the last time we'll be seeing him on screen for a while) are madly in love, or at least caught up in some kind of lambada of lust on the dance floor. They're also about to be married, until Jacqueline's best friend, the swan-like heiress Linett Ridgeway (Gal Gadot) locks eyes with Simon across the bar; suddenly Jacqueline finds herself irrelevant, and there's a new Mrs. Doyle saying "I do."

When she follows them on their honeymoon, refusing to be cast off so easily, the newlyweds beg Poirot for help. Can he come along on their pleasure cruise down the Nile, both as an honored guest and a handler of scorned women? This being Christie, it isn't long until the first body hits the floor, and everyone on board becomes a suspect: the bespectacled doctor–slash–cuckolded fiancé (Russell Brand); the sketchy finance guy (Bollywood star Ali Fazal; an American jazz singer called Salome (Sophie Okonedo), and her niece Rosalie (Black Panther's Letitia Wright); the covetous French ladies' maid (Game of Thrones' Rose Leslie). Even several socialites who hardly seem like the type to kill for anything other than a strong cup of tea and a biscuit join the list, including Jennifer Saunders' sniffy Marie Van Schuyler and her faithful nurse companion (Dawn French), and the imperious widow Euphemia (Annette Bening), who is mostly along to work on her watercolors and supervise her sweet but feckless son Buoc (Tom Bateman).

For a little while at least, it's nearly enough just to watch them all keep their accents straight (half the Brits are playing Americans and vice versa, or some Continental polyglot in between; Gadot just gets to Gadot). Okonedo leans gleefully into her purring diva, a cat on a hot tin riverboat, and Branagh's Poirot has the persnickety calm of a man who has never been proved wrong. (His pronunciation of the word "vegetables" alone is a tiny, nonsensical triumph of comic timing.) Hammer, whose personal scandals effectively halted his career this past year, isn't asked to do much more with the "engorged stallion" Simon than hold on to his Errol Flynn grin and throw libidinous looks around the room, but the outside context can't help creeping in.

There are some fun bits, inevitably, in pulling this many talented actors together and watching them vamp and skitter across the poop deck. But Nile leaves too many of them without much to do beyond stand around in costumes and wait for Hercule to drop a clue. The bigger problem, maybe, is that the movie's humid sexuality — and its oddly frictionless takes on race and class in the early 20th century — have to play against a series of sprawling screensaver backdrops that recall films from an entirely different era. Visually, Branagh's Egypt feels like it could pan a little further left and bump into Charlton Heston on a chariot; socio-politically, it's firmly in a Hollywood writers' room circa 2022. Even back when Christie first invented him, Poirot was a man out of time. Who he exists for now is a mystery it would take more than a murder and a mustache to solve. Grade: B–

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