The Thursday Murder Club follows a quartet of senior citizen crime solvers led by retired spy Elizabeth (Helen Mirren) and retired nurse Joyce (Celia Imrie). The film deploys broad, sentimental humor and relies on comedic beats that underline age-related clichés, such as scenes of swearing grandmothers and explanations of modern slang. Director Chris Columbus emphasizes crowd-pleasing laughs over subtle wit. The cast includes Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley, Jonathan Pryce as Elizabeth's husband Stephen, who is slowly succumbing to Alzheimer's, and David Tennant in a supporting part. Some moments feel patronizing rather than genuinely affectionate toward older characters.
retired spy Elizabeth (Helen Mirren) and retired nurse Joyce (Celia Imrie)-the former in a lumpy cardigan with a scarf tied around her hair-approach the village police station. Joyce enthuses about the trick the pair are about to play on the local constabulary. "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," she tells Elizabeth.
A longtime deliverer of fat slabs of Hollywood cheese, Columbus is constitutionally incapable of resisting the temptation to wring laughs out of women in their 70s swearing or displaying expertise in anything besides baking and knitting. That scene outside the police station-as well as a scene from the movie in which Joyce shocks a young mother on the bus by explaining what WTF means-never occurs in Osman's book.
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