jonw | Movie: The Thursday Murder Club (Reply)

By no means am I a professional movie reviewer, but I do often wonder why not. I don't mean that I want to do that as a career, more like I wonder what kind of credentials are expected from those who do. Everything looks simple from the outside but are complex nevertheless, and movie reviews are probably no different. I secretly think reviewers of all ilks are too full of themselves (nobody cares what you think) and tend to exude moral superiority where none is present (AKA: "I would never give a perfect review because nothing is perfect."). Art in all forms is so subjective that I have to wonder what use reviews serve at all. But, I digress...

Hollywood has one thing right; people will watch movies based on the cast. I had no real interest in the Thursday Murder Club, but it has such a great cast, aside from Ben Kingsley who I find cringey, that I gave it a whirl.

Aside: Dreamwidth has a really poor selection of editors. I prefer markdown by a mile, but there appears to be no "cut" token in markdown. It only exists in HTML mode, but I am really not into typing <em> some text</em> over _ some text _. I thought I could write an entry in markdown then switch to html to put the cut tag in, but the editor lost half my entry when I did that so I guess that's not a plan. But I digress again...

I liked the movie, almost entirely because of the cast. The retirement home is quite the place and I enjoyed thinking that one day perhaps I could retire to such a place, but mostly it was the cast. The story was very linear, easy to follow, and the writer kept checking in with us to make sure we were keeping up. I felt like I could leave the room for 10 minutes and come back to shortly be updated and thus not miss a thing. That is great if you do leave the room, but makes for a very tame ride if you don't.

The plot is quite simple, there is something that I think is supposed to be a twist or surprise ending but it doesn't land with any aplomb so it doesn't add any spice to the movie.

It reminded me a lot of the series Only Murders in the Building on CBC. Like reminds me a lot. I did not hate it, but I will likely forget that I saw it in a few days. Most shows or movies leave me with a silly phrase or something like that I use for a while after watching, but this one did not. There is very little to remember about this movie despite the stellar cast.