The Thursday Murder Club succeeds handsomely as a couple of hours with actors you've always loved cavorting as characters you enjoy getting to know.
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The Thursday Murder Club
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Rating: PG-13
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Run Time: 1 hour 58 minutes
Stars: Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley, Celia Imrie
Writers: Katy Brand, Suzanne Heathcote, Richard Osman
Director: Chris Columbus
In Theaters and on Netflix
If ever a movie had the audience standing in its corner, cheering it on and basically willing it to succeed, that movie would be The Thursday Murder Club, starring four of the screen's most appealing veteran actors as a clutch of mystery-loving retirees who gather once a week to try and solve cold case homicides.
So what if the mystery at hand is ultimately resolved only through a series of coincidences decidedly less probable than me winning next week's Powerball? We are in the company of Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley, Celia Imrie, Jonathan Pryce, and, as a delicious bonus, Richard E. Grant, all under the direction of the guy who made Home Alone, Mrs. Doubtfire, and the first two Harry Potter movies.
What could go wrong? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. That doesn't make The Thursday Murder Club a particularly good film. But even in a middling movie, when absolutely everybody in a ridiculously talented company is clicking on all eight cylinders, you'd have to be criminally grouchy to nitpick.
Mirren, Brosnan, Kingsley, and Imrie (you'll remember her from another apotheosis of aging, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) are residents of a British retirement home that rivals Downton Abbey in plush extravagance. These people don't just have rooms; they lounge in spacious, thickly draped apartments lined with bookshelves and furnished in the latest trends from Buckingham Palace.
But all is not well in Seniorland: The property's majority owner (longtime Doctor Who David Tennant), along with a gangster partner (Grant, who earned a lifetime of goodwill for his Oscar-nominated turn in Can You Ever Forgive Me?), has decided to throw the oldies out and build a housing development on the site. The only person blocking the heartless plan is a third owner (Paul Freeman), whose mother is a resident of the ritzy retirement home.
Of course, that guy turns up dead, and soon the arrow of guilt is twirling faster than the bottle at a post-prom party.
There's no shortage of suspects, and were this one of those interminable eight-part Netflix series, entire hours would be spent explaining to us why each particular character just has to be the culprit (that is, until our attention is diverted to someone else next week). But we're in the hands of pros here, and if director Chris Columbus knows anything, it's how to tell a fun story, define appealing characters, and reach a satisfying conclusion in two hours flat. (In this case that's no mean feat: Richard Osman's 2000 novel, the first in a successful Murder Club series, groans to nearly 400 pages.)
The red herrings, however, don't for one minute disturb the Murder Club's leader, Elizabeth, played by Mirren as a calculating, never-credulous snoop who, we learn through various asides, may well have a professional past that rivals that of James Bond. She's also got an enormous heart for her ailing husband Stephen (Pryce), an occasionally confused but stubbornly brilliant author.
If Elizabeth is the brains of the Murder Club operation, her fellow members bring their own kinds of smarts: Ron (Brosnan, gloriously scruffy) is a longtime union organizer who knows the streets like the back of his calloused hands. Ibrahim (Kingsley, sweetly officious) is a mathematician who cuts through misconceptions with his calculating wizardry. Joyce (Imrie) is a newcomer to the group with no particular sleuthing skills, but a talent for cake baking that renders grudging local cops helpless.
The "sweet old amateur investigator" trope has been around since Miss Marple, and the mystery at the center of Murder Cub won't be winning any Edgar Allan Poe Awards (the puzzle is solved only after one character literally digs a random hole in the ground). Still, The Thursday Murder Club succeeds handsomely as a couple of hours with actors you've always loved cavorting as characters you enjoy getting to know.
There's no mystery there.
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