It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Better Late Then Never

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

I first bought this DVD when it came out. I thought so little of it at the time that I sold my copy. While the plot was fine, the British actress' American accents were not quite convincing. In the interim, I have been reading the Christie cannon in order from the publishing date and David Suchet has completed all of the possible Poirots. After reading a book, it is nice to compare it to the movie. The script writing stayed very close to Christie's work. Three of the characters got subsumed into others or dropped completely making it able to follow the characters presented in the show. What I did not like was the changing of the ending for two characters who ended up engaged in the book. It did not seem necessary.The accents did not change in the subsequent years, but I deemed them better than some I have recently seen and am thus less of a snob.

I started to watch this on Netflix, and stopped after Linnet snorted cocaine. Having a sex scene at the very beginning was bad enough, but Linnet is not a drug using platinum blonde. Even with the wonderful David Suchet, I could not continue. In re-reading the book (which I was before I tried to watch this version), I did detest Linnet, but not because she was a drug using witch; it was because she was arrogant, selfish and betrayed her friend. She is supposed to be truly beautiful, intelligent, rich, ruthless and completely ignorant of how the world really works. She has to have the air of a child who has never been told "no", and doesn't understand that sometimes, just sometimes, she will not get her own way. The character I saw looked like a gum chewing broad who fell into money. Don't waste your time; watch the Peter Ustinov version.

A honeymooning couple, J. J. Field and Emily Blunt, take a cruise down the Nile. Among the usual variety of additional passengers is the insanely jealous ex girl friend of the groom, Emma Griffiths Malin, and the Stately, plump, mustachioed Hercule Poirot of David Suchet. Malin confides to Suchet that she has a little pistol that she dreams of putting against the head of the filthy rich and extravagantly beautiful blond who stole her fiancé, then gently pulling the trigger.One morning the ex beautiful blond is found dead in her room, a bullet hole in her head, and the initial of the jealous Malin drawn on the wall with her own blood. The blond's hair is scorched around the wound. Evidently some nameless person has put a pistol against that stunning skull and gently pulled the trigger.Things look bad for Malin. She had every reason to want the blond bimbo dead -- and a couple of other passengers might have had reasons too -- but, get this, Malin could NOT have killed the selfish slut. The night before, in the ship's saloon, Malin shot her ex boy friend in the leg and collapsed in hysteria. At Field's insistence, everyone rushes Malin to her stateroom and she is put under sedation by the doctor. (Christie's mysteries always have a doctor. They have to. He provides the time of death and other medical circumstances that the solution depends on.) A fellow passenger attends Malin all night long. When the other return to the saloon, they find Field writhing in agony, his tibia and composure both shot. Thereafter, Field is carried to the doctor's stateroom and is never left alone.It seems one of the other passengers must have killed Emily Blunt, but which one? The resentful Marxist? The personal maid that Blunt has offended? The American lawyer playing tricks with Blunt's investments and afraid of being found out? Medical discretion prevents a description of any further plot developments.I suspect that most people who see this will compare it to the much bigger, splashier, colorful, noisy 1978 production with Peter Ustinov as Poirot. At least that's what I did.I preferred the gargantuan version. Not because it's a work of art but because the production values are higher and this means it has virtues the more modest television production couldn't possibly equal.Here, the photography is a little dark. I mean, considering -- Egypt, the Nile, summertime. The score here consists of source music. A band plays contemporary tunes -- "Love's Old Sweet Story" -- but the movie has the kind of sweeping musical score by Ennio Morricone that's usually called "epic", and in this instance it's pretty good. In the movie, the honeymooners climb to the very top of a pyramid and we see them standing up there, radiantly happy, windblown, while in the TV movie they briefly visit a ground-level temple.The TV movie, being made for television rather than the wide screen, is full of stultifying close ups while the 1978 version gives us genuine vastness. And, while a supporting cast of name actors generally don't contribute much to a movie, other than the odd gasp of recognition, as in, "My God -- the piano player is FRANK SINATRA!", it really helps in the 1978 version. In the TV production I found myself confusing some of the characters' relationships to one another.More money also means more time spent on developing an entertaining and commercial script, with clearer plot threads. And, perhaps just as happenstance, the 1978 version has a superb performance by Angela Lansbury as the drunken, eccentric, erotomanic Salome Otterbourne.It takes nothing away from this above-average TV episode to say that you can simply DO more with a feature film, and you can take more time to do it. This is enjoyable on its own, though, and I prefer it to most of Agatha Christie's domestic mysteries that are part of this series. Even better than this is the episode "Murder in Mesopotamia."

Its not terrible, but something's wrong with this ambitious production - probably more than one thing - but I can't put my finger on it. They seem to be trying for a number of things that never quite work. Its technically well-done, but seems peculiarly lifeless, and the perfectly competent actors come off in a rather cardboard way. I suspect that it was "filmed" using hi-def digital video, and there's something about this new process that's tricky to get right when the subject is a period-piece, or something moody, because you can get hyper-realism that works against the story. This needs a slightly dreamy, gauzy, stylized quality that isn't there. It reminds me of Marlene Dietrich's comment about the transition from black-and-white to color film, that "the mystery is gone".