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| Image Courtesy Netflix |
British TV presenter and now mystery writer Richard Osman gained popularity over the last decade for his appearances on BBC panel shows and his nerdy and witty co-hosting duties on the game show Pointless. During that time, he began a series of mystery novels focusing on a band of pensioners in a lavish retirement home who solve cold cases.
When an aging owner of their retirement home, Cooper’s Chase, is murdered, the pensioners, who call themselves the Thursday Murder Club, get an actual case to solve. Osman’s first novel in the series follows this group of crime-solving retirees as they reveal their various talents for getting to the bottom of things.
Chris Columbus directs this efficient adaptation in a way that does justice to the novel’s coziness and humor, but leaves out many of the more moving scenes of character development and emotional heft. Anytime a film or series involves a retirement home, there’s plenty of pathos surrounding the everyday issues: widowhood, memory issues, loss of physical abilities, etc.
Osman’s novel took plenty of time to cover this ground, but this film version had to condense a properly complex mystery into a film that’s not overlong. In the process, a subplot and a character or two were dropped, as were more scenes covering the realities of retirement home life. So, the emotional heft of the novel was greatly reduced.
Still, Thursday Murder Club works so well to portray the story, the suspects, and the clues of the novel. The charm and chuckles of the film will likely win over anyone familiar with the novel, even if the film doesn’t do anything new.
Elizabeth (Helen Mirren), besides taking care of her memory-challenged husband, Stephen (Jonathan Pryce), leads the crime-solving club. Pitching in their various expertise are retired psychologist Ibrahim (Ben Kingsley), union organizer and rabble-rouser Ron (Pierce Brosnan), and retired nurse Joyce (Celia Imrie).
A slew of other British actors round out the cast, and everyone plays to their strengths: David Tennant, Richard E. Grant, Tom Ellis and Naomi Ackie. Each of these smaller parts works towards creating a cozy murder film, which could be one of the better Netflix releases this year.
- Eric Beach