The Thursday Murder Club movie review: Bland adaptation does scant favours to Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan

So I had high hopes of the film, which comes armed with a dizzying collection of stars. There’s Helen Mirren as Elizabeth, Ben Kingsley as Ibrahim, Pierce Brosnan as the union man Ron, and Celia Imrie as the delightful Joyce. Alongside, we have David Tennant, Richard E Grant, Daniel Mays, Naomi Ackie (such a scene-stealer in ‘Sorry, Baby’), and a bunch of others, scurrying about in plush retirement home Coopers Chase, which looks like a seven star resort, nothing less, investigating past and present murders.

But I’m sad to say that I’m disappointed with this good-looking but bland adaptation, which does scant favours to both its cast, and to Osman’s spry style which leaps off the page, with some surprisingly moving passages. It’s a hard thing to pull off: Agatha Christie is still tops, but her stories belonged to a bygone era; for a contemporary whodunit-which-keeps-it-cosy-yet-zingy, there really is no one to beat Osman.

It’s not as if this fine ensemble doesn’t do their best. Mirren sparkles, as she always does, as the canny Elizabeth, in her tweedy twin-sets and scarves. At one point, her husband says admiringly, ‘you look like the Queen’, and she smiles, as we do, at the meta touch; Mirren memorably headlined the 2006 ‘The Queen’. Jonathan Pryce plays her hovering-on-the-edge-of-dementia husband with just the right touch of vulnerability. Kingsley doesn’t get as much to do as he ought to, but Imrie does ditzy well, springing about with delicious cakes at the drop of a body.

And it’s not as if there’s any dearth of bodies. The cold case, belonging to the 70s, has one in which a young woman was skewered through with a knife ; the fresh one has a couple of dodgy characters with connections to Coopers Chase falling dead at quick intervals. The threat of their comfortable abode being sold off to be converted into plush flats– plusher, one assumes, than the ones they already have–has the residents upset ; not even the prospect of their resident llamas– what these creatures are doing in the English countryside remains a mystery till the end– can cheer them.

An illegal immigrant who goes by the singular name of Bogdan (Henry Lloyd-Hughes) makes a shocking discovery while digging up graves in the cemetery which abuts the Chase. Newbie policewoman Donna De Freitas (Ackie) is commandeered by our senior sleuths, much to the annoyance of her bumbling boss, the podgy Chris Hudson (Daniel Mays). The appearance of David Tennant, Geoff Bell and Richard E Grant, as the trio-with-a-dark-past, as well as Tom Ellis as Ron’s equally good-looking son, perks things up as and when.

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But the writing is shallow, and everything is underlined. It would have helped if the writers had taken note of Elizabeth telling Joyce not to call themselves ‘bright-eyed testy old ladies’, and duly added some nuance. In more than a few places, the punches are telegraphed in slo-mo. Why should a film, co-produced by Stephen Spielberg and directed by Chris Columbus (Home Alone 1 and 2, the first couple of Harry Potter adventures, among other blockbusters) feel, from the get-go, like it was destined to be labelled a ‘Sunday night drama’, with all the urgency of a day-time soap? It feels almost churlish to nit pick because this is such a good-natured enterprise, but this kind of flattening of some of the smartest, most fun retirees running down dreaded criminals we’ve seen in a long time? Now that’s criminal.

The Thursday Murder Club movie cast: Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley, Celia Imrie, Naomi Ackie, Daniel Mays, Jonathan Pryce, Richard E Grant
The Thursday Murder Club movie director: Chris Columbus
The Thursday Murder Club movie rating: 2 stars