★★★ (3 out of 4)
"For Codgers Only:" The cool kids might hang that sign on “The Thursday Murder Club,” the film version of the bestselling Richard Ozman mystery about senior sleuths opening in theaters today in advance of its Netflix premiere on August 28. My advice? Leave the cool kids to their next AI digitalized eyesore and enjoy the “Club” for the diverting fun it is and the polished pros who deliver it in high style. The movie is old-fashioned, but hardly old-hat.
Snobs condescend to such crime fiction as "cozies," a sub genre in which sex and violence occur off screen, the detective is usually older and an amateur sleuth, and the detecting takes place in a small, socially intimate community. Think “Murder She Wrote,” “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” “Only Murders in the Building” or anything by Agatha Christie.
Think twice about shaming “The Thursday Murder Club “as a cozy or you’ll have Dame Helen Mirren to answer to. “The Queen” Oscar winner has the lead role of Elizabeth Best, a former intelligence agent for MI6 as she’s fond of reminding people, who resides in a retirement home in the English countryside that looks like Downton Abbey.
Elizabeth and three other on-the-ball residents of Coopers Chase, as their manor house is called, have initiated a Thursday Murder Club to solve cold cases instead of knitting, playing pool volleyball or staring vacantly into space as some other residents are observed doing.
The other three Club members are Ron Ritchie, a rabble-rousing former union organizer known as Red Ron. He is played in full, flinty, comic vigor by Pierce Brosnan with a touch of James Bond that age hasn’t dimmed. Next up is “Ghandi” star Ben Kingsley as Ibrahim Arif, a psychiatrist who looks like he knows things and does. The newcomer is Joyce Meadowcrof (a canny Celia Imrie), an ex-nurse who brings cakes to meetings but never turns away from the sight of blood.
It's Joyce who asks: “I feel like we’re in one of those Sunday night dramas about two bright-eyed, feisty old lady detectives outsmarting the police at every turn. Do you feel like that?” It’s Elizabeth who responds with blood in her eye: “No. And never use the words bright-eyed, feisty old ladies in my presence again.”
Understood. Working from a serviceable script by Katy Brand and Suzanne Heathcote, director Chris Columbus brings the same slick competence you saw in the first two “Harry Potter” films (We won’t harp on the mess he made of “Rent.”). But only the actors go the extra mile.
The murders—one from the past and two in the present—have a scrappy complexity you might not be expecting. The residents are facing a ticking clock since the new owner, a deliciously depraved David Tennant, wants to carve up Coopers Chase and sell it for condos. This man must die. And he does. In fact, all the victims had it coming.
A well-meaning young policewoman, played by Naomie Ackie (She crushed it in the Whitney Houston biopic.), is brought in to investigate. But who are we kidding? It’s the seniors who have the savvy to show up the usual array of dumb coppers. And Mirren, Brosnan, Kingsley and Imrie raise the bar at every turn, commendably refusing to play their roles as adorably dithering old dears unless of course faking it gets them closer to solving a crime. The movie goes easy on the details of dying, a fact of life in such places, but doesn’t ignore the march of mortality or the signs of dementia afflicting Elizabeth’s husband Stephen, beautifully played by Jonathan Pryce.
What you see in this movie are actors who respect the age of their characters and the wisdom that comes with it. And that’s quietly revolutionary. It shouldn’t be, but it is. Ozman has written four more books about the Thursday Murder Club (the fifth arrives in September) and with this cast, you’ll want to see films of them all. And no way are they for geezers only.