Only murders on Thursdays, and only in or
around the Building
dir: Chris Columbus
2025
I reckon Richard Osman’s heart leapt high into the sky when he heard Steven Spielberg’s production company Amblin wanted to option his novel in order to adapt it into a movie. I mean, that’s got to be way up there, in terms of achievements. That’s beyond anything most authors, crime writers or otherwise, could ever aspire to. Dare to dream, indeed.
And then I imagine how much his heart sank when he heard that Señor Spielbergo wasn’t going to direct it himself, instead it would be the same guy who directed Home Alone, Mrs Doubtfire and the first couple of Harry Potter movies.
I mean, ouch. Dry your eyes on those cheques, though, Richard. I’m sure you’ll get over it one day.
I have not read any of his very successful and very beloved novels in this series or any other, though I have it on good authority from one of the smartest and most attractive people I know that his books are brilliant and a joy to read. I don’t read crime novels, ‘cosy’ or otherwise, because… look there are too many books to read as it is, maybe I’ll get around to them eventually, who knows. I’ve been reading the same book for the last three months, so maybe when I finish that 800+ page monstrosity…
Certain genres have, require, formula. From what I have heard and read, including from the man’s own mouth (in the podcast he does bi-weekly with Marina Hyde called The Rest is Entertainment), he delights in using the practical set-up aspects, the constructions, the artifice of it all (in the detective novel genre) in new and cheeky ways to tell short chaptered, fast paced stories anyone can enjoy. So the contrivance around creating something that seems so calculated as a delightful collection of golden oldies solving crimes and exchanging cake recipes must have seemed both a challenge and an opportunity at first, like a puzzle to solve, with massive sales as the potential prize.
And since it’s proved mega-successful, he’s obviously on the right path. I mean, surely we’ve reached the limits of the genre where dishevelled alcoholics always in trouble with their superiors routinely save the day and solve the crimes despite the mountains of accumulated trauma that they walk around with. Why shouldn’t it be time for something else, someone else to shine (rather than something entirely new)?
As stated previous, I can’t comment on the novels, but I can stand back in awe of the three initial, and eventually four main characters who motor around this deliberately convoluted plot in order not just to get us from A to B to C but to delight us in the in-between bits especially along the way.
Helen Mirren. Dame Helen Mirren. Has she been crap in anything ever? Probably, but if she has I haven’t seen it. They do say she was in Caligula back in the day, but I’ve never seen it, and it was probably not her fault. She has played a spy, and an ex-spy in a bunch of other movies as well, as well as (for me) most famously as DCI Jane Tennison in the legendary Lynda La Plante series Prime Suspect, as well as the Queen herself, so she’s done everything, really. This is easy for her, but only because she’s who she is.
Her character here kind of comes across as someone who used to really, really be important, who isn’t as much anymore by dint of age and circumstances, who still wants to exercise her skills and have an impact. She is in this place called Coopers Chase more because her husband (Jonathan Pryce) has dementia, than for her own needs. She keeps hinting throughout the film that she was a spy back in the day, and then explicitly at one stage outright says something like “I was the head of MI-6”, which kind of implies she’s based loosely on Dame Stella Rimington, one would think (even though she was head of MI-5). She shifts from imperious and bossy to charming and empathetic so swiftly that one’s head might spin.
And she’s called Elizabeth Best, so… I mean, come on. Surely someone with such a surname has had the burden of excellence and expectation weighing them down all their livelong days...
Pierce Brosnan is in this as Ron Ritchie. He does not play an elegant, silver fox ex-spy despite having played, you know, That Guy. Remington Steele. No, I meant Bond, James Bond. Here he plays a loud knockabout Cockney former unionist rabblerouser called Ron who loves a pint or fifteen, despite probably needing to pee every five minutes. His complete opposite is the prim and very proper Ibrahim Arif (Sir Ben Kingsley) who’s a retired psychiatrist, and who clearly knows the depths of people’s souls, but maybe is in denial about his own sexuality(?) I have no idea if his character is out and proud in the books, but they definitely shade it until the very end when he shows an old photo of someone he used to know / love (and when he had hair).
How is it relevant, you may ask? Well, it’s isn’t, not to the plot, but the thing is these actors are so wonderful, and so comfortable with these (mostly stock) characters, that it would have been lovely (for me, I can’t speak for anyone else) to just have them sitting around talking about themselves or their lives instead of solving three murders exclusively. Of course films are never made specifically for me, and they have to move along at a steady clip otherwise people might fall asleep, so bits of their lives get mentioned only when it’s relevant to the plot. We are all functional units in such cases. Of course, that luxury, one of time, isn’t available in movies with this many characters. The thing I’m talking about is, oh yeah, a streaming series, one that has an episode introducing the characters once something terrible happens, ends on a cliff hanger, and then has however many episodes to flesh out each and every character’s backstory and motivations before solving things in the last episode, before setting up the next season.
A fourth member is dragooned into the team, being the tentative Joyce (Celia Imrie) for her medical expertise, but also so the characters can explain themselves and what they’re doing to someone new (though not why they’re doing it), when the Club, with their creepy medallions, work on their cold cases.
Presumably, they usually do it on Thursdays, but for the purposes of this movie, they conduct their investigations on any given day. They don’t have time to waste, and I don’t just mean because of the hovering presence of the Grim Reaper where they reside. It may be an old folk’s home but a good half of it is ‘assisted living’, which means it’s croquet, ludicrously large pieces of cake and skydiving on one side, and hospice / palliative care on the other.
We don’t spend a lot of time in the hospice section, except when Elizabeth is visiting the founding member of the club, being legendary (in the book’s world) DCI Penny Gray, who lies in a coma, looked after by her doting husband John (Paul Freeman).
It’s safe (and easy, for me) to say that the flick doesn’t spend any time whatsoever on the reality of these kinds of places, because the place itself (from the outside) is an Elizabethan palace, and on the inside is as cosily furnished and as welcoming as any set of apartments you’ve ever seen. In truth I am more used to the places where there are residents screaming at the tops of their lungs much of the day or night, wandering the halls half naked and confused as to where they are, being served food you wouldn’t give to a dog you didn’t like despite paying $4000 a month in fees. So maybe my experiences are too limited to appreciate such a wonderful place.
No-one, unless they’re being deliberately obtuse, watches a flick like this wanting realism. I didn’t click on this flick thinking it was a documentary on what’s happening in Gaza right now. We demand escapism. We want a story where pensioners solve crimes as a way of keeping themselves occupied and mostly to stave off the boredom and loneliness that even the best of us fall prey to. Their motivation isn’t that different from ours. As such, this group, this band of gregarious geriatrics, put aside for the moment the mystery of who killed some poor woman 60 years ago, which I’m sure will play no part in what happens going forward, in order to not only figure out who killed who and how recently, but they have to save their beloved Coopers Chase, which is at risk of being bulldozed and redeveloped. By evil developers. And Polish builders! With our Heroes being hoist out by their arses into the gutter!
There are so many red herrings along the way, but c’mon, it’s not like we want it solved in the first half hour. This isn’t Death in Paradise, or Return to Paradise, or any of those Brit shows in idyllic locales where the crime, despite being fatal, is never that violent, and the solution is derived easily within 45 minutes without ads or your money back.
Of the four of the main peeps I feel like this one, probably as opposed to the books that follow, places Elizabeth very much front and centre in both the deducting, the action and the solutions, in that her character is not only dynamic (she gets shit done), she’s the catalyst for everything that follows, directly and indirectly. Sure, they all get something to do or stuff to say, but it’s almost comical how non-essential some of the stuff they do is. There’s a bit with Ibrahim where they’re trying to rule out whether a particular character could have committed a particular murder, and Ibrahim slowly drives from one site to the other, claiming to have an algorithm that he’s going to apply in order to figure out this difficult and complicated data point.
The humour comes from how slow he’s driving, which irritates the other oldies, but I couldn’t help but wonder if the ‘algorithm’ he was going to apply was maximum possible legal speed x distance equals not enough time, or something even simpler.
That’s not an algorithm. It’s barely an equation, but he’s helping, so…
There is a fifth involuntary member of the team, because the overall implausibility of the club having access to current police info requires them to have an in with the pigs. Into the breach steps Constable Donna De Frietas, who they (by which I mean Elizabeth) treat appallingly, however they also bolster her career in order to make her more useful (to them). Naomi Ackie has had a great couple of years, from the magnificent Lady Macbeth and the okay Mickey 17, Blink Twice and now this she’s been in three solidly successful flicks. Plenty of actors don’t get three solid flicks in a row.
She alternates, as I guess the role demands, from baffled, to indignant, to monotonal professional as any situation requires (as in, when she’s giving the club info she’s not meant to be giving anyone). The contrivances around how easily the club can get her where they need her or get info from her are easily hand-waved away considering how delightful she is, and how she’ll probably end up boss of all cops in Britain before the club are done with her.
Yes, it’s hokey, yes it’s cheesy, and yes it’s perfectly enjoyable. One of my favourite moments in the flick, which started as an eye roll, arose from when Elizabeth dresses up in a particular way, and her husband points out ‘ha, you look just like The Queen’, and, yes, that’s funny because she played the Queen in a film called The Queen which was all about how mean Betty II was to Diana. And then Johnathan Pryce turns it all around, saying how sad he was when she died and they watched her funeral on the telly, and he seems actually heartbroken.
And then I remembered that he played Prince Phillip in The Crown in the last season…
None of that is played as a joke, for obvious reasons. You don’t get to make more cosy crime comedies if you’ve been drawn and quartered by an enraged British public. These actors, these legends, they have built up so much goodwill within an adoring public that they basically only have to show up in order to get us on side, but, being the pros that they are, they don’t just phone it in.
Yes, there are too many characters, but I also really liked Ron’s son Jason who keeps turning up, played as a lunkhead boxer by Tom Ellis, of all people. I mean, he played sassy and tremendously bi Lucifer in the series of the same name, and now he’s happy to be Dancing with the Ice Skating stars, as long as he’s on the telly. There’s not enough of it, but the father and son stuff between the old unionist and his thug son with a heart of marmite warmed the sub-cockles of my heart,
There’s another single scene great cameo, which I won’t spoil, but however useless it ultimately is in the context of this plot, I have no doubt he will pop up again in subsequent outings. It’s quite an intro, for any character, to be covered in blood for no good reasons.
Look, none of it is meant to be taken too seriously, and the ending makes almost everything that’s transpired seem almost superfluous beyond it being the catalyst for getting the supergroup together, but it was quite enjoyable getting there all the same, and you could easily watch it with your geriatric parents around without worrying that something untoward is going to appear onscreen and make everyone go deathly silent yet dying from embarrassment. It’s ‘naughty’ but only in the most PG of ways.
It’s an industry, this cosy crime stuff, and I’m not one to stand against it. Some people need endless episodes of Dexter or NCIS (definitely not me), or Vera (definitely me), and others want to see oldies get revenge on the young (for their youth mostly) by sending them to jail, and I’m all for the latter.
Bring on ten more of these movies, Netflix (quickly, before anything happens to the cast, chop chop!)
7 times we should give our beloved, remaining parents a call, whatever hellish facility they’re being kept in out of 10
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“We better get started.”
- “Yes, intermediate knitting starts here in one hour.” – can’t keep the other clubs waiting, or there will be more murders The Thursday Murder Club
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