Death On The Nile Review: 6 Ups & 4 Downs
Downs...
4. The Wildly Uneven Pacing
One of the chief complaints about Branagh's Murder on the Orient Express was that it took a little too long to get going, and that too is true here.
So much time is spent on the preambles of the story and introducing us to this admittedly massive cast of characters - or rather, future suspects - that the movie is well over the half-way mark before the focal murder has even been committed.
As fun as it is to simply drink in the titular cruise down the Nile with this diverse cast, viewers couldn't be blamed for getting fidgety long before the instigating death occurs.
By comparison, the second half of the film is a more frantic sprint to the finish, breathlessly ripping through melodramatic subplots, deaths, bait-and-switch twists, and so on, some of which could've benefitted from having a little more time to sit.
Ultimately this isn't to the film's fatal detriment, but a little editorial reshuffling might've served the story better.