And the murderer is…
You’ll have to watch for yourselves, 3.5 readers.
BQB here with a review of a surprisingly good movie for Hulu.
You might remember in 2017 Kenneth Branagh breathed new life in the seminal work of the great mistress of the whodunnit, she who gave birth to the modern mystery novel and perhaps the modern mystery film by association – the great Agatha Christie. Five years (how have they gone by so quickly) later, Branagh is back as Christie’s signature protagonist, the brilliant (both in mind and mustache) Detective Hercule Poirot.
This film has more stars than your favorite constellation, so part of me is surprised it has flown under the radar. It came out on February yet I just realized it was on my second favorite streaming service which to me is like saying my second favorite bag of doggy doody (but I’ll get into my love/hate relationship with streaming services another time.)
The other part of me isn’t surprised the fanfare for this flick has been lackluster. It’s a historical piece, and a thinker at that. Like most whodunnits, it follows Christie’s tried and true formula of putting several flamboyant personalities into one location, giving them all a motive and then, egads! Murder most foul! Lock the doors and bring in Detective Poirot! You’ll have to follow the clues, take notes and keep track of the evidence…or just be lazy like me and munch popcorn while Poirot does all the work and take his word for it.
Here, the dessert loving stache man has been invited on a pleasure cruise of the Nile, at the behest of newlyweds played by Gal Gadot and Armie Hammer. (Sidenote, there’s a scene where Gal grinds her tucas on Armie’s junk on the pyramids so hey, that’s fun. Oh, sorry for the spoiler…then again maybe you’ll watch for the grindage.)
Long story short, these two are absurdly good looking, absurdly successful and absurdly rich, such that they draw the envy of many a cruise guest and drive one of them commit a most heinous crime.
Letitia Wright of Black Panther’s sister fame, that wild snow girl who dated John Snow in Game of Thrones whose name I can’t remember, Annette Bening, Russell Brand and more whose names I don’t feel looking up. This flick really was a get for the Hoo to the Loo.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. Come for the mystery. Stay for the suspense. Feel free to pause it on Gal grinding her hiney. Curse your family’s bad genes that prevented you from being a handsome actor like Arnie who gets paid to have his junk grinded on by Gal Gadot. Oh and eat more cookies. That always helps.
Bookshelf Battle 
To me, silly as he looks and acted, Albert Finney will be my fave Poirot. I think things were lackluster with this one because people remember the choices KB made with MOTOE (seriously, have ’em all sit in chairs in the snow at the tunnel entrance like schoolchildren waiting for a lesson? The tense, claustrophobic dining car was a better looking/feeling scene in the 1974 flick… and other adaptations as well). Admittedly, I couldn’t bring myself to watch much of the 2017 movie.
I was hoping this one would be a pretty good movie. Never read a Poirot mystery all the way through (probably some excerpts read in high school literature), so I don’t know if the whole movie v. book thing was gonna be a big thing or not. Oh well. I like thinkers, though, and even if it is a KB movie (I sat through many a pissed-off teen discussion of how he f-ed up and completely misunderstood Artemis Fowl and I keep wondering what happened to his directorial ability once he moved past the first Thor movie). Oh well. I’ll have to give it a whirl someday.
At least it had Gal Gadot being risque