The Thursday Murder Club Review
Richard Osman, the man best known in the UK for quiz shows like House Of Games and Pointless, entered the world of crime fiction in 2020 with The Thursday Murder Club, which became a bestseller and spawned three sequels. Now, Netflix hopes to have the same success as it adapts the first novel into an all-star mystery.
The title refers to a group of friends at a luxury retirement village in England. Each week, Elizabeth (Helen Mirren), a retired government employee, is joined by former Psychiatrist Ibrhim (Ben Kingsley), ex-nurse Joyce (Celia Imrie), and former union leader Ron (Pierce Brosnan) to pore over cold cases from the past. A new case lands at their doorstep, however, when the owner of the village (Geoff Bell) is murdered in mysterious circumstances. With suspects emerging from all corners, they team up with a junior police constable (Naomi Ackie) to find the culprit before they strike again.
Many detective stories have enjoyed long lives because of their cosy nature. Shows like Midsomer Murders, Murder, She Wrote, and the numerous Agatha Christie adaptations combine a sense of ease with the intrigue of a complex case. This movie, directed by Chris Columbus (Home Alone, the Harry Potter franchise), gets the first part right, but forgets to put a sting in the tail.
Everything about the movie is designed to be pleasant – the jokes are harmless, and usually about the gang pretending to be harmless old folks to get what they want from unsuspecting sources. The setting looks like a location from The Great British Bake Off, and the familiarity of the cast gives the film a prestige it hasn’t really earned.
As the two-hour runtime ticks by, however, you feel like you’re always waiting for the main plot to start. The storylines are simplified, presumably for a streaming audience half looking at their phones, with stakes that never feel particularly urgent. Certain twists seem pointless, while Columbus never quite seems to know how to wrangle his cast. Kingsley, perhaps one of Britain’s most celebrated actors, feels redundant, while his co-stars drift in and out of the plot intermittently. Only Mirren really seems to have anything substantial to do, and even then, it’s via the overwhelmed-looking Ackie as her eyes are on the inside.
The script is filled with little comic touches that drop like lead balloons. At one point, Mirren goes undercover, and her ailing husband (Jonathan Pryce) remarks, “You look like The Queen”. The film then almost pauses as it waits for you to get the joke, which wasn’t especially funny in the first place. Then there’s Brosnan, woefully miscast as an East London wide boy, who spends much of the film in a losing fight with his cockney accent.
A slow pace, a crowded cast, an oversimplified plot, and an unsatisfying finale are all culprits in this literary assassination. So cosy it becomes comatose, The Thursday Murder Club may feel comforting with its famous ensemble, but it lacks the bite to be anything more than a streaming diversion.
★★
In UK cinemas now, on Netflix from August 28th / Helen Mirren, Ben Kingsley, Pierce Brosnan, Celia Imrie, Naomi Ackie, Richard E. Grant, David Tennant / Dir: Chris Columbus / Netflix/ 12A
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