Richard Osman’s 2020 novel “The Thursday Murder Club” succeeded by impeccably blending playful murder mystery with thoughtful matters of life and death given the eponymous quartet of London pensioners solving cold cases in the jigsaw room of their posh retirement home Coopers Chase. The cinematic version, alas, directed by Chris Columbus is neither playful nor thoughtful; it’s flat; it has, unfortunately, Netflix written all over it. Katy Brand and Suzanne Heathcote’s adapted screenplay turns the quartet, each one a fully formed individual in the novel, into what is essentially the four-person rock and roll band from “Almost Famous,” Stillwater, with two members brought way up in the mix (Helen Mirren’s Elizabeth and Pierce Brosnan’s Ron) and the other two (Ben Kingsley’s Ibrahim and Celia Imrie’s Joyce) just along for the ride. And that might be fine. Adaptations must make choices, after all, about what goes and what stays and what changes. But then, why make Joyce’s introduction to the group the narrative starting point if you’re going to reduce her to mere cake-baking comic relief? Is there a three-and-a-half-hour cut? (I don’t want to see it.)
This odd sidelining of Joyce and Ibrahim also underlines “The Thursday Murder Club’s” most significant problem: the titular group never feels like one. Columbus evokes no real chumminess between them, never makes it seem as if they are gleefully in on something together, and never invites us, the audience, through those figurative clubhouse doors either. And though the emergent mystery ties back to saving Coopers Chase from dastardly intentions to destroy it, the retirement home never comes alive either, rendered not so much as a lively community but just a series of well-lit rooms. Just as the whole movie feels like an outline waiting for the real one, so does Coopers Chase feel like contrived images from a senior living brochure. And though there is a rather substantial change the film makes to the book’s conclusion, one that has apparently thrown many of the novel’s fans into a tizzy, I hardly felt worked up given how little any of this is made to count in the first place.