Death hovers over The Thursday Murder Club, not only because its title organization’s business is homicide, but because its members are older men and women living in a retirement community where the Grim Reaper is a persistent presence.
A mystery carried out by senior citizens who are facing down the end—and determined to prove that they’ve still got plenty of life left in the tank—Chris Columbus’ adaptation of Richard Osman’s 2020 novel, streaming Aug. 28, is a good-natured thriller headlined by the reliably commanding Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, and Ben Kingsley.
It won’t revolutionize the genre, and in fact would have benefited from considerable additional polish, but it’s just cute enough to warrant two hours of Netflix subscribers’ time.
Despite the misgivings of her hedge fund manager daughter Joanna (Ingrid Oliver), Joyce Meadowcroft (Celia Imrie) moves into Coopers Chase excited about the possibility of making friends. It takes no time for that to happen, since during her walkthrough of the lavish English manor house, she stumbles upon Elizabeth Best (Mirren), Ron Ritchie (Brosnan), and Ibrahim Arif (Kingsley) poring over a murder board decorated with crime scene photographs. The evidence stems from a 1973 cold case about a woman in white who died under suspicious circumstances (i.e., she fell out a window, and her shady boyfriend blamed a masked intruder for the killing).
The fact that Joyce doesn’t flinch at these gory sights indicates to Elizabeth that the newbie was once a nurse. When her hunch is proven correct, she invites Joyce to become the fourth member of their club, which was founded by Elziabeth and her best friend, police officer Penny, who now lies unresponsive in bed while her husband John (Paul Freeman) reads to her.
Penny is a daily reminder that the proverbial clock is ticking, as is Elizabeth’s relationship with husband Stephen (Jonathan Pryce), whose dementia has ended his career as an author, but who on good days remains a formidable chess player.
The Thursday Murder Club doesn’t shy away from the sadness and fragility of older age, and its tenderness does much to endear one to it and its characters. The same can be said about its stars, who confirm that regardless of their birthdate, they’re A-listers for a reason.
As Elizabeth, a former MI6 bigwig who’s the ringleader of this troupe, Mirren is a self-assured, cunning, and intimidating proto-Miss Marple, and Brosnan and Kingsley are amusing as her sidekicks Ron and Ibrahim, the former a labor rabblerouser who loves nothing more than a protest, and the latter a psychiatrist whose fussiness is epitomized by his crisp suit and bowtie.
Joyce fits in comfortably with this gang, and her arrival turns out to be auspicious, as sinister things are afoot at Coopers Chase. Immediately after the foursome spy the facility’s co-owners Tony Curran (Geoff Bell) and Ian Ventham (David Tennant) squabbling in the car park, Tony is found dead of a violent bludgeoning.
Given that he’s in the midst of a nasty and costly divorce, and was scheming to transform Coopers Chase into luxury flats—a renovation that involved digging up its cemetery, and was vehemently opposed by Tony—Ian is an obvious suspect. Nonetheless, nothing is quite that simple in The Thursday Murder Club, and subsequent fatalities complicate matters and cast doubt on a variety of figures, including Ian’s right-hand contractor Bogdan (Henry Lloyd-Hughes) and Ron’s famous ex-boxer son Jason (Tom Ellis), who once did odd jobs for Tony and Ian.
Columbus’s direction is jaunty, yet his visuals are dampened by Netflix’s low-lighting house style; even in exterior scenes, the film looks muted and drab. Katy Brand and Suzanne Heathcote’s script, however, is The Thursday Murder Club’s Achilles’ heel.
While the proceedings’ plotting is twisty-turny, the action is too sitcom-y by half, and much of that is due to its simplistic and wooden dialogue. Brosnan and Kingsley are particularly impacted by the tepid writing, which even their energetic line readings can’t enliven. A punch-up would have done wonders for the material; as it stands, it’s passable if lacking the spry wit and cleverness it needs.
Richard E. Grant eventually joins The Thursday Murder Club as a shady person with ties to Tony and Ian, and from the get-go, the Club partners with PC Donna De Freitas (Naomi Ackie), a local police officer who gets assigned to Tony’s case thanks to her quid-pro-quo arrangement with Elizabeth—an agreement that routinely aggravates DCI Chris Hudson (Daniel Mays).
Donna’s participation, as well as a late revelation, lend the action a bit of feminist verve. Even in that regard, however, the film has no interest in fieriness, content to be a milquetoast crowd-pleaser that smooths out its rough edges via easy-bake resolutions. Columbus ruffles no feathers throughout, and the result is a quaint lark that plays it far safer than its protagonists, whose quest for answers (and justice) has them taking all sorts of risks, including meeting shadowy figures in cemeteries at night and visiting notorious gangsters in their lairs.
The Thursday Murder Club is a who’s-who of past and present British actors, and it gives all its luminaries brief moments to shine. At two hours, though, it’s long in the tooth, and that isn’t changed by the fact that the more Elizabeth and company investigate, the higher the body count rises.
Aside from a few age-related jokes, it also doesn’t work very hard to be funny, meaning that the focus is primarily on the multiple mysteries at hand. Alas, despite their superficial convolutions, those whodunits are light on ingenuity, just as the looming possibility of Coopers Chase being shut down feels, from the start, like an idle threat. Urgency and danger are in short supply, and that’s only partially offset by the magnetism of its leads.
Still, if The Thursday Murder Club doesn’t totally live up to its illustrious cast, it does establish a template that could easily be improved upon in subsequent installments. After all, if the streaming revolution has taught us anything, it’s that there’s an insatiable appetite for stories about murder and mayhem—and in the right screenwriting hands, Mirren, Brosnan, Kingsley and the rest of their compatriots might very well make a winning over-65 team.
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