Crime thriller “The Thursday Murder Club” on the trail of Miss Marple

Everyone knows Miss Marple. In 1927, mystery master Agatha Christie invented Jane Marple, a curious old lady with a brilliant mind who solved murders as an amateur detective. She lived in the small town of St. Mary Mead, where the English world was (largely) in order. The four Miss Marple films starring Margaret Rutherford remain among Germany's favorite film classics and are something like the prototypes of the snobby detective film with humor and a restrained thrill. Incidentally, the most famous of all amateur detectives made her first literary appearance in a short story called "The Tuesday Night Club" in the "Royal Magazine."

That's why the new film by veteran US director Chris Columbus, whose credits include the first two "Harry Potter" films, is called "The Thursday Murder Club." The homage to Agatha Christie, of course, comes from Richard Osman, the author of the four "Thursday Club" novels, which have also been translated into German.

Osman's Miss Marple goes by the name Elizabeth Best and is played in the film by the eternally elegant Helen Mirren. She is the most stylish lady in Cooper's Chase, a super-feudal retirement home that most viewers would never dream of.

With the three other club members, former union leader Ron Ritchie (Pierce Brosnan), the sophisticated psychologist Ibrahim Arif (Ben Kingsley), and her new roommate, nurse Joyce Meadowcraft (Celia Imrie), Elizabeth, who initially lists her former profession as "international affairs," works on cold cases – cases in which investigations were closed without result. The current case is one from 1973, when a young woman named Angela Hughes fell out of a window with a knife in her chest.

We'll find something better than the most difficult Sudoku in the newspaper anywhere, says the good-natured Joyce, when she's asked to replace the comatose ex-police officer Penny Grey as a probationary club member and contribute her medical knowledge to the search for the murderer. Suddenly, there's a hot case. The nice Tony Curran (Geoff Bell), the one of the three owners of Cooper's Chase who tried to prevent the sale of the property and its grounds, is killed.

Now the inmates are threatened with eviction because luxury apartments are planned for construction here. And detectives will soon discover that murder cases, in which vested interests are still active and perpetrators wish to remain undetected, pose a different level of threat to the club than the ancient corpses on the files.

And so a cozy search for the perpetrator, with at least a few funny moments, sets out to entertain the viewer for two hours – with a clever young black police officer (Naomi Ackie) and her slightly dopey boss (Daniel Mays) as professional crime investigators.

The private hardships of the heroes and heroines are included to awaken more empathy for them: Elizabeth has a charming but demented husband (Jonathan Pryce), Ron struggles with his relationship with his son Jason (Tom Ellis), Ibrahim is gay and lonely like Joyce, who has recently been widowed.

If you've reached your level of suspense with series like "Murder, She Wrote" or "Inspector Barnaby," this is about right for you. Any explicit violence here is left to the viewer's imagination. The quirky Britishness, the quirkiness that makes such series entertaining even for fans of harder crime genres, is rather weak, however. Hollywood is more clearly involved here than, for example, in Rian Johnson's entertaining "Knives Out" films with Daniel Craig.

Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, the company with the boy and ET on a bicycle in front of a full moon as its logo, led us to expect more. And Chris Columbus—to be honest—has never been synonymous with depth, but rather with gimmicks and props.

It's Mirren's turn, who turns out to be an ex-colleague of James Bond, a former MI6 agent. Fifteen years ago, Mirren played a retired agent in late-action in Robert Schwentke's comic book adaptation "RED." Most recently, she played the tough rancher Cara Dutton in the "Yellowstone" spinoff "1923," and in Guy Ritchie's super-tough gangster series "MobLand," based on "The Murder Club," she played the secretive and rather devious clan matriarch Maeve Harrigan. Brosnan and Bell joined her on the "MobLand" set.

In a scene from "Thursday Murder Club," her country-mom look is referenced from Stephen Frears' drama "The Queen" about Queen Elizabeth II. "You look like the Queen," enthuses her husband Stephen. He also suggests they watch "Hot Suspicion" again—the long-running, deservedly award-winning series that launched Mirren in 1991. And Columbus doesn't realize he's suggesting where they might be able to watch something more interesting.

“The Thursday Murder Club,” film, two hours, directed by Chris Columbus, based on the novel by Richard Osman, starring Helen Mirren, Celia Imrie, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley, Naomi Ackie, Daniel Mays, Henry Lloyd-Hughes, Jonathan Pryce, Geoff Bell, Tom Ellis, and David Tennant (already available to stream on Netflix)