Title: Review of The Thursday Murder Club (Netflix)
Fandom: Mods, please tag as f: movie (category).
Rating: G-rated
Length: 226 words
Summary: Five issues I had with Chris Columbus' film adaptation of Thursday Murder Club (2025), written in poetry form for no good reason, idek. Just me grumbling, really. Contains major spoilers for the book and film.



1.
Joyce is the heart
of the books -- all sly humour,
observation and ability to connect.
Reduced in the film to a crayon outline.
In general, I find voiceover lazy
but this erasure of her inner life
was lazier. I would have liked
to hear her diaries, actually.

2.
What kind of retired spy
blurts out the name of her former employer?
Elizabeth would never. What's more, the final scene
with Penny was panto-level,
booted feet trampling
a tangle of forget-me-nots.
A final indignity.

Could we at least admit murderers
don't warrant a sappy funeral?

3.
And Bogdan. He was not
who I expected, but he worked
perhaps best of everyone.
An ethnic minority in England,
trapped and exploited by rich arseholes
but pragmatic, clear-sighted, still able
to befriend an old Englishman.

Only to be made a murderer - what? -
and carted off by cops
with no ambiguity, support
or resources.
Immediately forgotten.

4.
So compressed, there was no time
to illustrate Elizabeth and Joyce's
growing mutual appreciation,
the personal stakes and
loyalty of new friends late in life.

Ibrahim, too, too quiet and
idiosyncratic a voice to survive
translation to this travesty.
Talk about a murder!

5.
Overall, it collapsed
under its gratuitous star power,
Pierce Brosnan, endless cameos, and
good actors given subtext-free dialogue
with nothing to embody.

Transparently made for viewers
with both eyes on their phones.