The Thursday Murder Club poses a simple question: if a murder mystery features Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley, and Celia Imrie hoodwinking the law and gallivanting around a beautiful stately home, can it really be anything less than great? The answer, unfortunately, is yes. No matter how enticing the prospect may sound on paper, and even with the efforts of director Chris Columbus (of Home Alone and Mrs Doubtfire fame), the whole affair is so flimsy you’ll lose nothing from watching it on an iPad while cooking dinner.
Certainly, a part of that lightness is intentional. While The Thursday Murder Club will briefly make the cinema rounds, its ultimate destination is Netflix. Richard Osman’s bestselling source novel, about retirees turned amateur sleuths, incited a fierce bidding war over publishing rights, and spawned a successful run of sequels – all, in short, because there’s no real safer bet than a cosy comfort read from the former co-host of Pointless.
But, in Katy Brand and Suzanne Heathcote’s adaptation, Osman’s tale is masticated even further, made so digestible it now barely exists. Each clue is presented plainly, legibly, and without even a hint of enigma, at one point simply written out on a Post-it and then shown directly to the audience. Here, the approach to establishing a Chekhov’s gun would be to essentially wave the rifle in the audience’s face and mouth the words, “pew pew”.
Every Thursday, the film’s central Septuagenarian quartet leave their apartments in the luxury retirement facility of Coopers Chase, with its own archery range and emotional support llamas, and meet down in the conservatory. (Columbus never bothers to shoot a single hallway or ensure the horizons outside their windows make sense, making it impossible to ever grasp the place’s floor plan.) They rifle through cold cases until a dead body turns up on their own doorstep. At the centre of the scandal are plans by Coopers Chase’s co-owner, Ian Ventham (David Tennant), to turn the local cemetery into luxury flats and the house into an events space.
The police inevitably underestimate the acuity of these retirees, despite their former occupations: Brosnan’s Ron Ritchie was a union leader, Kingsley’s Ibrahim Arif was a psychiatrist, Imrie’s Joyce Meadowcroft was a nurse, and Mirren’s Elizabeth Best worked in “international affairs”, a phrase delivered with a wink and a nudge.
Considering Miss Marple was one of the founding icons of the detective genre, while Steve Martin and Martin Short are currently looking at a shelf full of Emmys for their sleuthing series, Only Murders in the Building, it’s not as if the concept that our elders can solve murders is one that needs to be proven to an audience. And, besides, the police here are depicted as so wildly incompetent – fronted by an exasperated Daniel Mays, with Naomi Ackie’s Donna De Freitas as the sole exception – that the Murder Club are hardly even given the opportunity to flex their grey matter.
We’re told one character has been missing for years, only to be shown a photo of them – and, what do you know, they’re played by an A-list actor and thus guaranteed to resurface. The cast have been seemingly told to play their scenes so broadly and turned out towards the audience that you half-expect Kingsley to ask us to kindly move Colonel Mustard to the library. So, no, one simply can’t live on Helen Mirren alone.
Dir: Chris Columbus. Starring: Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley, Celia Imrie, David Tennant, Naomi Ackie. Cert 12A, 118 minutes
‘The Thursday Murder Club’ is in select cinemas from 22 August, and streams on Netflix from 28 August
