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When a Dry British Mystery Clashes with a Hollywood Movie

As a relatively rare non-British person who was familiar with Richard Osman as a comedian and television presenter before he became an internationally bestselling author there’s something kind of quaint about seeing an adaptation of his first novel The Thursday Murder Club, starring a collection of British acting legends and helmed by Chris Columbus, a director with a fair amount of pedigree. Just because my own reference point for Osman, as someone who hasn’t read the books, is as the tall lanky guy with some good dry wit who shows up occasionally on QI and Would I Lie to You? 
There’s a similar quaintness to the movie itself though, which skirts the edges a little of that light comedy subgenre coined by Isabel Custodio, Book Club Cinema”, centred on elderly characters played by revered stars engaged in low-stakes shenanigans within a setting and atmosphere of vaguely upper-class retired comfort. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is perhaps Britain’s best example of this type of film. Yet The Thursday Murder Club has a little bit more edge than those typically do. It is after all a murder mystery, with the drama and darkness that goes along with that -and for its cheesy set-up, the murders, the suspects and motivations are all taken seriously, perhaps by Columbus more than anyone.
Set in the retirement community of Cooper’s Chase in Kent, the movie opens on the Thursday Murder Club as already an active part in the lives of three pensioners -Ron Ritchie (Pierce Brosnan) formerly a Union leader, Ibrahim Arif (Ben Kingsley) a retired psychiatrist, and Elizabeth Best (Helen Mirren) who formerly had some sensitive job with the British Intelligence service. Their fourth compatriot Penny is deep into dementia, and so in her stead the club recruits retired nurse Joyce (Celia Imrie). Their latest investigation kicks off when the callous new landowner Ian Ventham (David Tennant) comes to Cooper’s Chase with the intent of re-developing the property, particularly a nearby convent cemetery, to the protests of the community. Their one ally and Ventham’s co-owner then turns up mysteriously dead. But it won’t be the only murder the club have to contend with.
In fact there are three mysteries occurring simultaneously through much of the film, one of which -a murder from before the start of the story that Penny was looking into- is returned to intermittently between the action beats of the main premise despite having apparently no connection to the rest of the narrative. It’s more contained within a personal arc for Elizabeth and her desire for closure on Penny’s behalf before she passes away. Elizabeth’s own husband Stephen (Jonathan Pryce) also has dementia, and the spectre of illness and death hangs over these characters  trying to keep themselves intellectually active through their golden years. It is morbid, but something I appreciate this story acknowledging. Indeed for slotting into the more comfortable, almost pastoral recesses of the murder mystery genre, prominent in books, there are some aspects of the story that dip into grave seriousness, and I can only imagine they work better in Osman’s context than Columbus’s.
It’s been a solid decade since Columbus made a proper movie in Hollywood -the dreadful Pixels. And I get the impression he wants to come back -The Thursday Murder Club, streaming on Netflix and having a Masterpiece Theatre kind of atmosphere feels very far from his most successful works like Mrs. Doubtfire, the early Harry Potter movies, and most significantly Home Alone. At times one can detect his efforts to make the film feel bigger than it is, whether by emphasizing the severity of the lair of one of the suspects or closing the film on a pan out from a CGI Cooper’s Chase (already characterized as a Jacobethan-style ornate estate resembling Downton Abbey) that is a perfect match to the way he ended the second Potter film. Rather than make anything in the film grandiose though, Columbus’s ambitious directing only feels more at odds with the wayward, convoluted storytelling.
The mysteries -none of them- are never entirely engaging, and after a point where a second character is murdered, it just becomes tedious. Richard E. Grant shows up as another, silent partner in the ownership of Cooper’s Chase -a gangster, while circumstances also start to implicate Ron’s TV star son (Tom Ellis). But these dramatic pushes, and especially the way they are handled by the script (from Osman’s fellow panel show regular Katy Brand) are empty complications seemingly designed to make the circumstances more exciting -because however you dice it, the land ownership motivations behind whoever must be the murderer, are quite dry.
And the characters are too. With the mild exception of Elizabeth -whose espionage background is very mysterious and who has the benefit of Mirren giving weight to her sensitive scenes, the Thursday Murder Club are a fairly dull team, and there is no reason they should be. They all come from different backgrounds that ought to give them unique advantages in mystery solving. But we actually don’t often see all four of them together (the men and women seem to be split up for much of the runtime), and their personalities aren’t much expressed. Brosnan performs reasonably Ron’s working-class bona fides and complicated relationship with his son, but the film doesn’t scratch much past the surface there. Meanwhile Ibrahim and Joyce -despite her being the newcomer and our audience surrogate into the club itself- are undeveloped and underwritten to the point they disappear into the movie’s background from time to time. A major waste of Kingsley and Imrie’s talents.
Tennant has fun with the vileness of his character, while Paul Freeman (Belloq from Raiders of the Lost Ark) as Penny's husband makes the most of his best exposure in years. However, Naomi Ackie, playing the police officer friend of the club, closes off her exquisite year with sadly a rather mild character, mostly there to contrast the humourous brusqueness of Daniel Mays. Pryce also, who could have been one of the club members, is undervalued beyond one somewhat interesting scene. Behind the scenes, Columbus brings over some other heavy-hitters from Hollywood: the film is shot by Robert Zemeckis's regular DP Don Burgess, and scored by Thomas Newman of several classics. And both of their imprints are felt on the film -it looks a little better and sounds a little better than the English TV dramas this film otherwise resembles. But it is still not noteworthy work from either of them.
With a couple of twists yet no real clues for the audience, the mysteries are resolved of course, but there's no sense of catharsis over them. Columbus fails to invest Cooper's Chase with its sense of value or imbue the mysteries with intrigue -much as he wants The Thursday Murder Club to be his next Harry Potter. Given the success of the book, I can't imagine the movie does well by it -certainly it doesn't translate whatever Osman's spirit was. It fits right in on Netflix unfortunately enough -curious in a few respects, modestly charming in others, but altogether forgettable and disposable.

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