'Thursday Murder Club' review: Helen Mirren, Ben Kingsley, Pierce Brosnan make this movie a joy

WHAT IT'S ABOUT "The Thursday Murder Club" finds a cast of heavy hitters playing British pensioners who gather each week at their retirement home to investigate unsolved murders.

These include Helen Mirren as Elizabeth, a retired spy, and Pierce Brosnan as Ron, once a politically active union leader. Ben Kingsley plays the psychiatrist Ibrahim and Celia Imrie ("The Diplomat") is the newcomer to the group: Joyce, a retired nurse.

The picture begins with the pals looking into a cold case from decades earlier. But they get swept up into the drama around contemporaneous killings when the co-owners of their home, a lavish estate called Coopers Chase, start turning up dead.

Cast members also include Naomi Ackie (the Whitney Houston biopic "I Wanna Dance with Somebody"), Richard E. Grant, Jonathan Pryce, David Tennant and others. The veteran Chris Columbus ("Home Alone," "Mrs. Doubtfire," etc.) directs the Netflix movie, an adaptation of a 2020 novel by Richard Osman.

MY SAY If you're reading this and thinking that "The Thursday Murder Club" sounds like a British version of "Only Murders in the Building," you're not wrong. 

But you could also do worse than a movie that relies on that tried-and-true formula, while gathering all these terrific actors and placing them in the hands of a director who still knows his way around commercial entertainment.

The movie blends moments of comedy, such as a shot of Brosnan gleefully taking part in a pool exercise class, with others that veer toward the poignant and emotional, and still others that are meant to be dramatic or even suspenseful.

Columbus is not the right director for everything (the less said about his "Rent" adaptation, the better), but he's ideal for this. He knows how to take those disparate tones and to congeal them into a seamless whole without giving his audience whiplash. The picture never leans too heavily in any particular direction, while the filmmaker makes sure to keep the actors and the characters as the central focus, instead of loading the movie up with gags or plot twists.

His stars imbue those characters with strong personalities, presenting them as dignified people instead of the subjects of easy jokes. Their investigative pursuits are serious and substantial, not a lark for a bunch of bored retirees. Any one actor of the trio of Mirren, Brosnan and Kingsley would have been enough to carry the movie. To have all three of them here, sharing so many scenes, amounts to a small gift.

While the murder mystery goes in an interesting enough direction, it's not ultimately the point. The movie finds its heart in the ways it presents the joys of friendship and companionship, and in its understanding of how having people who get you and your idiosyncrasies can make all the difference in the world.

BOTTOM LINE Great actors and a director who gets how to make a movie like this work: What more could you want?