The Thursday Murder Club is an irritating film adapted from an annoying novel – a gimlet-eyed “cosy crime” bestseller from 2020 by TV presenter Richard Osman, memorable largely for its air of calculation. What a hollow page-turner it was. Reading it was like playing a game of Cluedo with someone who thought board games were for nerds and losers.
So all credit must go to Netflix, Steven Spielberg’s production company, Amblin, and director Chris Columbus, whose take on the book (Netflix, Friday) preserves the resplendent smugness of the source material. With all the zing of a lesser season of Inspector Morse, it chronicles the adventures of a group of older people who spend their days solving fictional mysteries – until a real-life murder lands at their doorstep, when the co-owner of their retirement home in Kent is viciously bumped off.
There are subplots about the invisible pain of migrants to the UK and a digression on the indignities of growing old – but it all feels formulaic and much too self-regarding for its own good. Not to cast aspersions, but I’m not sure if the people involved in the project love cuddly whodunits or the idea of cashing in on other people’s love of cuddly whodunits. A crime of passion it is not.
The cast is impressive – headed by the evergreen Helen Mirren as a former MI5 spook, with Jonathan Pryce as her Alzheimer’s-afflicted husband, Ben Kingsley as her co-conspirator and David Tennant as a villainous developer. If there is a weak link, sadly, it is the greatest James Bond of all, Pierce Brosnan, who plays a one-time union leader yet struggles to conjure the necessary pugnacity.
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Brosnan will forever and always be 007 and doesn’t sell the part as a former Trotskyist who has trotted off to retirement. He’s forever banging on about picket lines, yet you constantly expect him to whip out a Walther PPK and scoot down a zip-line. Maybe they should do the decent thing and make him the new (old) James Bond. He’d be great as a pensionable super-spy back for one last mission.
Actors aside, everything else about this feature-length adaptation feels like an exercise in box-ticking. The original novel cannot be blamed for Columbus’s perfunctory direction, which screams “made for TV” movie. But it does have to shoulder responsibility for a plot of eye-watering hokeyness and a twist that would have felt lame on Murder She Wrote circa 1985. Despite the hype, The Thursday Murder Club is a bust all week long.
[ Helen Mirren on turning 80: ‘I am not ageing gracefully at all. I hate that term’Opens in new window ]
