Some murder-mysteries – Seven, for instance – immerse you in grisly menace. Others – Memories of Murder – weave a web of intricate plotting and surprising feints. The Thursday Murder Club, by comparison, just wants to plump up a cushion, pour you a nice cup of tea and spin you a cosy yarn with an unusually high body count.
And, honestly, you’d be a silly sausage not to enjoy it on those terms. For a movie in which people die violently every 30 or so minutes, the stakes are stupendously low, the vibe steadfastly upbeat.
In fact, there’s more fuss at Downton Abbey when a fork goes missing than when Tony Curran (Geoff Bell), a flash building developer at posh retirement village Coopers Chase, gets bumped off. The dastardly deed is all the crime-solving pensioners at the heart of Richard Osman’s best selling murder-mystery novels need to set about ID’ing the culprit, in between mouthfuls of Celia Imre’s surprisingly moist sponge cakes.
Alongside Imre’s newcomer Joyce, an ex-nurse whose handy forensic knowledge sees her fast-tracked into the group, our amateur sleuths are Helen Mirren’s Elizabeth Best, a guileful ringleader with a coy espionage back story. Land-grabbing Ray Winstone’s rightful turf, a grinning Pierce Brosnan is West Ham-supporting ex-union boss Ron, and Ben Kingsley is gentle psychiatrist Ibrahim.
The gang, who congregate in the orangery each Thursday to puzzle over a long-ago cold case, prove equally adept at elbowing their way into the new investigation. But who is behind the killings? And are they perhaps linked? The rogue’s gallery includes David Tennant’s oily property developer, Ron’s reality TV star son (Tom Ellis), Polish builder Bogdan (Henry Lloyd-Hughes), and a tattooed gangster played, semi-convincingly, by a cameoing Richard E Grant.
For a movie in which people die violently every 30 minutes, the stakes are stupendously low
Harry Potter veteran Christopher Columbus presides over the mild-mannered sleuthing with an Anglophile affection. The American director is, of course, a whizz at world-building. With Coopers Chase he gives us a kind of ‘Hogwarts with dodgy knees’ where everyone’s on the way out and what’s another body for the pile? The police (led by Danny Mayes’s portly copper) are charmingly lamentable, with Naomi Ackie’s eager London constable Donna De Freitas a more biddable, less wryly detached presence than in the book. Less interesting, too.
Lovers of the first Thursday Murder Club novel, from which this is adapted, should brace themselves for other tweaks. Most come in the name of streamlining the plot, but it’s a shame that so little of Osman’s subtle treatise on mortality – the idea of senior citizens wrestling back their vitality in the face of death – has made it from page to screen.
Mind you, this was never going to be Amour. Grab your nan, put the kettle on and enjoy some exceedingly fine thesps hamming it up royally.
In select UK and Ireland cinemas Aug 22. On Netflix from Aug 28.