You may be wondering, ladies and gentlemen, why I’ve brought you all here. Well, I have some bad news. You see, there’s been… an adaptation. And the victim was known to you all: The Thursday Murder Club, the first in Richard Osman’s series of “cosy crime” novels about a quartet of sleuthing retirees.
Perhaps due to these books’ extraordinary popularity (three of his four murder mysteries have sold over one million copies in the UK), such an adaptation was inevitable. Except no one could have foreseen that the result would be quite so thin and perfunctory; so nefariously lazy; so fiendishly pleased with itself.
Steven Spielberg’s production company snapped up the film rights even before the first novel had been published. Chris Columbus, of Home Alone and the first two Harry Potter films fame, is the director. Note, too, that it was financed by Netflix: no Scrooges in budgetary matters. So why, then, has the film been carried off with all the cinematic flair of a Sunday night ITV2 serial from 2006?
Bear that peculiarity in mind as we turn to the starry cast. Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Celia Imrie and Sir Ben Kingsley play Osman’s pensioners, whose hobby for solving cold cases turns real when there’s a murder at their palatial Kentish retirement home of Cooper’s Chase. Four apter stand-ins could hardly be found.
Yet perhaps because on the page, Osman’s characters occupied an odd, ideologically-evasive space between romanticism and pastiche, the four actors never seem to work out if they’re playing people or spoofs.
Nor, for that matter, do we. Take Brosnan’s former union rabble-rouser “Red” Ron Ritchie, with his stylish denims and rough-and-ready London accent, which (in line with its owner’s principles) appears to go on strike in every other scene. He’s less a human being than a cipher for the nice, old-fashioned sort of Left-wing firebrand from the days where you knew where you stood with them – while Kingsley’s Ibrahim, a retired Egyptian psychiatrist and eternal bachelor, is essentially the same but for gay men and immigrants.
Imrie’s Joyce, the group’s newest member, has little personality beyond liking baking, while Mirren’s former ex-MI5 agent Elizabeth is a doughty establishment type, cut and pasted from Judi Dench’s M in the Bond films and Mirren’s own performance in The Queen. As for the joke about Mirren’s resemblance to Elizabeth II when she dons glasses and a headscarf – well, it’s the sort of thing you only try when you don’t especially care if the audience are invested or not.
Helen Mirren’s ex-MI5 character relies heavily on Judi Dench’s M character from the Bond films for inspiration – Netflix
As an occasional source of broad and undemanding chuckles, the film doubtless serves its purpose. But the mystery itself unfolds with such plodding expediency that there’s little suspense to speak of. And the plot – which involves the deaths of Cooper’s Chase’s unlovely owner, played here by David Tennant, and his builder (Geoff Bell) – has been pruned and reworked to the extent that one of the murders no longer even really qualifies as such.
What remains is something that less resembles a whodunnit than a half-hearted parody of one – perhaps the sort of thing a critic might find himself writing in the hope it might liven up his review of an extremely bland film. So there you have it. Mystery solved.
12A cert, 118 mins. In cinemas now; on Netflix from Aug 28
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com ’
