The Thursday Murder Club director, Chris Columbus, has made a long career out of taking seemingly innocent characters and turning them into stars. He has directed such gems as Home Alone and the first two Harry Potter films, but those were almost easy. The director was in full control and didn't have veteran actors to give real pushback.
Not as far as the leads anyway. If Columbus suggested a young Daniel Radcliffe do something in Radcliffe's role as Harry Potter, the actor did it. Columbus could then move on with the move.
But this also, at times, gave his films an overly fluffy feel. The first two Harry Potter films needed that. The characters weren't yet teenagers, and we viewers didn't need to be inundated with adult themes.
The Thursday Murder Club works quite unexpectedly
Where Columbus has failed is in projects like Nine Months and Rent. While Nine Months was prime Hugh Grant, and not completely unentertaining, it was also slight. Rent should have been done by a braver director who took on the challenges of real socio-economic issues.
The above, ironically, is why The Thursday Murder Club is a real winner. The Netflix project could have delved into darkness, but it didn't need to be. Ultimately, the script is meant to be a comic-thriller, and the actors and audience know it.
In fact, the choice of actors involved is important to the design of the movie. We know Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Jonathan Pryce, and Ben Kingsley can do superserious films and do them well. But when tasked with the nuance of adding elements of comedy, they also shine.
Plus, and this shouldn't be overlooked, the script by Katy Brand, Suzanne Heathcote, and Richard Osman (based on the book by Osman) is tight, and the mystery is excellent. We might think we know who killed someone, but we don't. The people we might presume to have done the deed often get murdered themselves.
(Be forewarned: Some spoilers lie below.)
The premise is based on a group of retirees (played by Kingsley, Mirren, Brosnan, and Celia Imrie) who live together at a fancy retirement village and try to solve cold cases. Life becomes real after the owners of the luxury village, Coopers Chase, start being knocked off.
One of them, Ian Ventham, is played by the versatile and excellent David Tennant. While Ventham is clearly self-absorbed, and a lazy script writer might have had him be the obvious killer, he is almost too ridiculous to have plotted a scheme to take over Coopers Chase.
The same fate unfolds for Tony Curran (played by Geoff Ball), who seems to be too much of a mobster to be more Moriarty than some goon. He's scary, but possibly unintentionally.
In the end, the real killer was right underneath our noses, and we might have detected the truth the entire time. Would that make the payoff any less? Not at all. If anything, viewers might be even more empathetic to the plot.
But it is the childlike enthusiasm of trying to understand what is happening by the characters of Brosnan, Mirren, Mirren, and Imrie that makes The Thursday Murder Club work. Fit matters. While Tim Burton is arguably a much better director than Chris Columbus, Burton might have made the movie too dark. Columbus's lighter touch works perfectly.