There's always a certain theatricality to movies or TV shows about sleuths.
Whether it's the adventures of Hercule Poirot or Jessica Fletcher, Benoit Blanc or Charlie Cale, audiences often have to wade through well known actors delivering very wordy scripts as their characters fall under suspicion for a dastardly crime.
As many shows and films have discovered, there's a huge risk in these talkfests of the cast overacting and the direction becoming bland and stale.
Netflix's 'The Thursday Murder Club' takes this challenge on, having built up quite an audiencewith a successful series of books.
Set in a retirement home where four amateur sleuths meet up and solve crimes while also indulging other interests like baking, knitting and yoga, British TV presenter Richard Osman's series has spawned five books and had huge commercial and critical success.
The books have topped best seller lists on both sides of the Atlantic, with over 10 million copies of the various murder mysteries sold worldwide.
Inevitably it attracted the interest of Hollywood which is always on the lookout for a franchise and with Steven Spielberg only interested in producing, the question was who would direct a movie adaptation of Osman's original 2020 novel?
Enter Chris Columbus who knows a thing or two about bringing publishing sensation to the screen, having directed the first two Harry Potter movies.
Just like those films, Columbus has assembled a cast of well known British and Irish acting faces.
At the core of Osman's story is a band of senior citizen amatuer sleuths - Helen Mirren's ex-British intelligence operative Elizabeth Best, Pierce Brosnan's West Ham supporting retired trade union leader Ron Ritchie, Ben Kingsley's psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and Celia Imrie's new resident and former trauma nurse Joyce Meadowcroft.
Other residents include Elizabeth's dementia suffering husband Jonathan Pryce's Stephen Best, Ruth Sheen's tough dame Maud, Paul Freeman's devoted husband John Gray and his wife, Susan Kirby's Penny who was a former Detective Inspector and original member of the Thursday Murder Club who suffered a stroke that confined her to a hospice bed.
David Tennant's arrogant and greedy Ian Ventham runs the plush retirement home they live in but has plans to sell it and a cemetery to developers for luxury flats.
That brings him into conflict with the residents because that will mean they will be turfed out on the streets and will have to look elsewhere.
He is not the sole owner, with Geoff Bell's tough bloke Tony Curran and a mysterious figure with East End gangster connections known as Bobby Tanner also needing to be persuaded.
When Curran, though, is murdered in his home, it piques the interest of Elizabeth, Ron, Ibrahim and Joyce who is recruited by the trio after she deploys her knowledge of trauma in a cold case that has long fascinated the group.
The Thursday Murder Club have also recently befriended Naomie Ackie's overlooked but promising young local Constable Donna De Freitas after she pays a community policing visit to their home.
Relying on Donna for inside knowledge about the murder investigation led by Daniel Mays' inept and arrogant DCI Chris Hudson, they feed her in return their insight into what may have happened.
However with more bodies piling up as the investigation proceeds, can the Thursday Murder Club help Donna crack who's really responsible?
There's no disputing the acting pedigree of the cast that Chris Columbus has assembled.
How could you dispute such an accomplished cast?
But my goodness, they're hammy in this movie.
They're so hammy you could swear you hear the pigs grunting within seconds of Columbus' film.
It doesn't help that Katy Brand and Suzanne Heathcote's screenplay of Osman's novel is so stage English.
In an attempt to appease international audiences, it's all cream cakes, cups of tea, pretty gardens and posh people hanging about with cor blimey Cockneys - all that's missing is a Pearly king and queen.
It's also incredibly patronising about older people in a "bless them, aren't they wonderful still living their lives to the full" way?
The dialogue is leaden and the film is weighed down by the kind of cumbersome plot exposition that often undoes sleuth murder mysteries.
And so it comes as no surprise that even actors as accomplished as Mirren overact.
Kingsley camps it up with overblown facial expressions.
Brosnan does what he often does - mangling an accent like he is trying to a glammed up version of Uncle Albert from 'Only Fools and Horses'.
Tennant seems to think he is still in 'Rivals'.
Mays, who is normally such a reliably good actor, gets sucked into the hamminess of it all, as does Richard E Grant when he pops up later in the film as a florist.
The same goes for Ruth Sheen, Geoff Bell and Tom Ellis who plays Ron's retired champion boxer son and reality TV star Jason.
Those who emerge with some of their reputation intact are the members of the cast who underplay it all - most notably Imrie, Ackie, Pryce and Henry Lloyd-Hughes as a Polish worker that Ian Ventham recruits to his cause called Bogdan.
And while Columbus slavishly adopts the same look, feel and pace of his 'Harry Potter' movies, the film is also undermined by very unimaginative casting.
Mirren seems to have been cast because she has played intelligence operatives before and because it enables the screenwriters to deliver a very laboured joke about her character looking like the Queen.
Kingsley has played a psychiatrist before, so it follows that he'll play the retired psychiatrist.
Brosnan is handy with his fists, so let him have a moment to throw a punch
And after his regular role in Apple TV+'s 'Small Horses,' why not help Jonathan Pryce corner the market in playing dementia sufferers?
'The Thursday Murder Club' books have a devoted fanbase and this handsome looking adaptation will no doubt have legions of fans.
But it is not a patch on Rian Johnston's 'Knives Out' movies which show how cinematic guile can help sleuth movies avoid succumbing to actors simply playing to the gallery with copious portions of ham.
With four more books to adapt, is it too much to hope Netflix can elevate Osman's work beyond feeling like a 'Murder She Wrote' tribute act?
Let's see.
('The Thursday Murder Club' was released in cinemas in the UK and Ireland on August 22, 2025 and was made available for streaming on Netflix on August 28, 2025)
Comments
Post a Comment