The Thursday Murder Club

In a quiet retirement village, four spirited seniors—Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim, and Ron—form the Thursday Murder Club, meeting weekly to dissect unsolved crimes. When a local developer is found dead under suspicious circumstances, the group seizes the chance to investigate a real case. Their amateur sleuthing unearths secrets and stirs up the community.

The Thursday Murder Club Review

The Thursday Murder Club is the mini-muffin of direct-to-streaming murder mysteries. It looks yummy. It smells tasty, but after you’ve eaten the whole box (don’t judge me), you quickly realize that each muffin’s fluffiness was air meant to substitute for substance.

                   

Such is Netflix’s newest offering. The Thursday Murder Club is a breezy cinematic jaunt that neither demands much of its audience nor gives its audience much worthy of such demands. Instead, it’s so much fluff, filled with over 300 combined years of experience and charisma in front of the camera.

Helen Mirren leads a cast of heavyweights that includes the Academy Award-winning Sir Ben Kingsley and her Mobland hubby, Pierce Brosnan. The fact of the matter is that despite a script that peters out in the third act, with its mystery solved more or less by happenstance, The Thursday Murder Club’s main quartet of players are having such obvious fun that it’s hard not to join them.

The result is a movie that you need not reserve for a special occasion, and will probably end with you scrolling through your phone by its conclusion, but there are far worse things to watch (many of which are on Netflix).

WOKE REPORT

It’s Netflix. Count Yourself Lucky

• Netflix is the king of DEIsasters. Known for its gender and race swaps and complete disregard for historical accuracy, the smattering of woke tropes in The Thursday Murder Club is as shocking as it is refreshing.
  • The scale is slightly tipped in the girl-power/sisterhood direction. The cast is not as much an ensemble as it is a Helen Mirren-led film with a very strong and pervasive supporting cast. She’s the leader of the group and has retired from a position that, in the real world, has been held by a man since its inception in 1909, until two months ago.
    • The men have less importance in the film and play no role in the ultimate resolution of the mystery.
    • One tertiary male character was a renowned and famous boxer whose career was cut short by an injury and is now doing whimpy and feminine programs like cake-baking reality shows and Ice Skating with the Stars.
  • A black female cop, recently transferred from a large metropolitan precinct to this small town, is smarter and more observant than the overweight and slovenly male chief inspector, who has twenty more years of experience than she.
    • I didn’t mark the Woke-O-Meter down a lot for this because she’s not in the show much, and because he’s not a complete idiot, and he’s in the show even less.
    • There’s a scene in which the precinct is having a meeting, and she is treated like a servant, getting tea for the men.
      • It’s unclear and unsaid whether this is because she is new there or a woman, but it’s hard to miss that she is both the only black person and the only woman, and the only one being treated like a second-class citizen. It’s ambiguous enough that I only shaved off a couple of points for it.
  • It’s ambiguously hinted at early on that Ben Kingsley’s character might be gay, and then it’s dropped until the last 30 seconds of the film, when it’s confirmed beyond a shadow of doubt. None of it has anything to do with the story. It’s there for points only.