{"id":1974094,"date":"2025-08-22T09:16:16","date_gmt":"2025-08-22T09:16:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=1974094"},"modified":"2025-08-22T09:16:16","modified_gmt":"2025-08-22T09:16:16","slug":"the-thursday-murder-club-film-has-all-the-cinematic-flair-of-an-itv2-serial-from-2006","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/the-thursday-murder-club-film-has-all-the-cinematic-flair-of-an-itv2-serial-from-2006\/","title":{"rendered":"The Thursday Murder Club film has all the cinematic flair of an ITV2 serial from 2006"},"content":{"rendered":"

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You may be wondering, ladies and gentlemen, why I\u2019ve brought you all here. Well, I have some bad news. You see, there\u2019s been\u2026 an adaptation. And the victim was known to you all: The Thursday Murder Club, the first in Richard Osman\u2019s series of \u201ccosy crime\u201d novels<\/a> about a quartet of sleuthing retirees.<\/p>\n

Perhaps due to these books\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

Steven Spielberg\u2019s production company snapped up the film rights even before the first novel had been published. Chris Columbus<\/a>, 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?<\/p>\n

Bear that peculiarity in mind as we turn to the starry cast. Helen Mirren<\/a>, Pierce Brosnan, Celia Imrie and Sir Ben Kingsley play Osman\u2019s pensioners, whose hobby for solving cold cases turns real when there\u2019s a murder at their palatial Kentish retirement home of Cooper\u2019s Chase. Four apter stand-ins could hardly be found.<\/p>\n

Yet perhaps because on the page, Osman\u2019s characters occupied an odd, ideologically-evasive space between romanticism and pastiche, the four actors never seem to work out if they\u2019re playing people or spoofs.<\/p>\n

Nor, for that matter, do we. Take Brosnan\u2019s former union rabble-rouser \u201cRed\u201d Ron Ritchie, with his stylish denims and rough-and-ready London accent, which (in line with its owner\u2019s principles) appears to go on strike in every other scene. He\u2019s 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 \u2013 while Kingsley\u2019s Ibrahim, a retired Egyptian psychiatrist and eternal bachelor, is essentially the same but for gay men and immigrants.<\/p>\n

Imrie\u2019s Joyce, the group\u2019s newest member, has little personality beyond liking baking, while Mirren\u2019s former ex-MI5 agent Elizabeth is a doughty establishment type, cut and pasted from Judi Dench\u2019s M in the Bond films and Mirren\u2019s own performance in The Queen. As for the joke about Mirren\u2019s resemblance to Elizabeth II when she dons glasses and a headscarf \u2013 well, it\u2019s the sort of thing you only try when you don\u2019t especially care if the audience are invested or not.<\/p>\n

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