This year started off with a sequel to a mystery I quite enjoyed -- Kenneth Branaugh's second Agatha Christie -- Death on the Nile. And since Knives Out made my Top 10 list last year, I was really looking forward to this. Unfortunately, it's poor satire, with too many uninteresting, and over-the-top characters. You need more than just a big name cast filming in Greece, with interesting set pieces.
A billionaire (Edward Norton) has an annual party on his private island, and perhaps he saw the brilliant comedy Game Night, and decided to go with a murder mystery theme for the weekend. Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig, the only one from the original) shows up, although Miles Bron (Norton) tells him he was never sent an invitation.
The movie becomes various exposition dumps to tell us everything we need to know about these folks. Early on you start to realize -- nothing is all that interesting about anything happening. Sure, an island that looks like it belongs to a James Bond villain is kind of cool. I guess.
Norton is supposed to be this Elon Musk-type of tech billionaire with a brilliant mind, who doesn't own a cell phone, but does everything by fax. It is slightly amusing to find out he's not as smart as we initially thought. Janelle Monae, always welcome on screen, plays a woman that everyone is surprised showed up. She had a relationship with Bron that went south. And you get more backstory, on the backstabbing she got from him.
Kathryn Hahn, whom I love, was wasted in this, playing a one-note politician who didn't do all that much. Kate Hudson, who annoys me in most movies she's in, plays a famous person that had recently been cancelled. She can't seem to stop tweeting controversial stuff and trying to act sexy. Dave Bautista plays a gun-toting goofball who has millions of followers online. He's so into his guns that when he arrives at the dock to head over to the island, he fires a shot in the air. When he arrives at the mansion, he's got the gun strapped to his bathing suit as he jumps into the pool...and fires off another round as he gets out of the water. Perhaps Bron should inform him that, with his huge glass onion sculpture, bullets shouldn't be flying everywhere.
He's brought along some arm-candy named "Whiskey"
Leslie Odom Jr. is in this, but for the life of me, I can't even recall his character from having seen this picture a month ago.
There's a funny cameo with Yo Yo Ma. And I enjoyed seeing Blanc enjoy a cigar in a bathtub while facetiming with the late Angela Lansbury. Bravo!
There were also cameos with Serena Williams and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar that are mildly amusing (I preferred Kareem's cameo in the short film John Bronco that Hulu released a few years ago). Perhaps the weirdest role, according to IMDb, is Joseph Gordon-Levitt. He plays the sound of the clock we hear that makes a "boing!" sound each hour.
And, because so many movies these days need to play a Bowie song, we get one. The film ends with the Beatles title track, and we also see Bron serenade someone with Blackbird.
And of course, there's also a barfing scene. According to my calculations, now 72.3% of all movies have one.
I'm amazed the critics have all been praising this. I was bored and didn't care about the characters. My wife didn't care for it, either. The cast may have had a fun time making this but spending 2 1/2 hours with them...won't be your idea of fun.
2 stars out of 5.