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The Thursday Murder Club has its flaws. It’s certainly not a great movie and it may not even be a very good one, but it manages to be charming and gently entertaining so how fair would it really be to tear it down? 

In the UK we have a tradition of easy homicide dramas being made for TV. Recently we’ve had Death Valley, Ludwig and Moonflower Murders and these follow on from shows like Lovejoy, Midsummer Murders, Dalziel & Pascoe and Death in Paradise to name a very few. All of these were born to some extent or other from the legacy of Agatha Christie whose work also found a firm home on the box with long running adaptations of Poirot and Miss Marple. There is a fair variety of quality within these but none of them are hard hitting or gripping in the manner of shows like Line of Duty, Silent Witness or Luther. America has its share of similar shows of course; Murder She Wrote, Bones and Diagnosis Murder among them, but the village settings, parochial characters and local concerns set the British versions apart in a distinct way. The Thursday Murder Club fits right into this mould and had it been serialised and kept out of cinemas then I’m sure that some of its own crimes would have gone undetected. 

As a film it is clunky, exposition heavy and unrealistic. It is directed by Chris Columbus who famously started off the Harry Potter series and this fits as the events played out here are almost as fanciful, albeit fuelled by convenience and contrivance rather than magic. In fact if the players here had taken Felix Felicis that would make a lot more sense of everything. Also for film that so celebrates life and focuses on the value of ageing, it has little regard for death and the cutting off of people’s opportunity to reach their twilight years. It is oddly amoral in its response to those that have been murdered. Then at one point one of the lead actors is dressed up in the costume of one of their previous roles as well which is random and clumsily handled and almost undermines the tone of everything else. (It’s not Pierce Brosnan so it’s not Bond, although elsewhere the film does posit the idea that you get given an Aston Martin when you retire from MI6 which does play into this cinematic legacy.)

With all of this though the movie is still delightful. Much of this is due to its casting. Centring on a foursome of pensioner sleuths living in a grand retirement home (which itself would not have looked out of place in the grounds of Hogwarts) the film has brought together a group of older actors with a great wealth of cinematic experience (essentially it’s all of those who weren’t already in Harry Potter). As well as Brosnan we have Helen Mirren, Ben Kingsley, Celia Imrie, Richard E. Grant and Jonathan Price and these are people with screen charisma to spare. Incidentally it also features Paul Freeman who back in the day gave a classic performance as Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark so look out for him too. Together these legends totally carry the film and do so effortlessly. It is hard to care too much about what is wrong when this group are getting it so right. I’ve heard that fans of Richard Osman’s source novel think Brosnan is miscast (I’ve not really read it, for me it didn’t pass my three chapter rule) but it is actually good to see him playing against type a bit. 

The way the story portrays older people is good too. At times it feels a little bit like it does when a male writer can’t write for woman, as in when one character amusingly reveals she explains what WTF stands for but then undermines this by saying she only knows because ‘her daughter told her’, but generally it manages this aspect without being patronising. I suspect this again is largely due to the actors bringing their own truth to it. Jonathan Price does particularly well here as his Stephen is perhaps a little more relatable to the lives and concerns of many real octogenarians and is portrayed with respect and sensitivity. (Helen Mirren is, as ever, 80 going on 40.)

There is no denying that The Thursday Murder Club could have been a better movie then. In places there has been some misjudgment and possibly even some narrative laziness. As a whole though it is held together by its great cast and I suspect it will find a big and largely satisfied audience. I am sure that sequel The Man Who Died Twice is an inevitability and I’m quite looking forward to it. Pierce Brosnan would actually have been perfect for that book’s Douglas Middlemiss but maybe they’ll call Timothy Dalton instead. Hopefully there’ll be something in there for Ian McKellen and Judi Dench this time too.