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(More customer reviews)Everyone else thinks Pat Fisher was a suicide. Detective Inspector Tom Monroe (Robert Carlyle) isn't so sure. A paranoid, stumbling man, Fisher finally eased his pain one night by running onto a highway into the path of a truck.
In Fisher's room, Tom finds a class photo of a group of 10-year-olds taken in 1976. Fisher had circled three of the children's faces. They were part of a small group of the kids who played together. Then there was the tape recording Tom discovers with Fisher's frightened voice rambling on..."Amy was the first. It happened on a Sunday. She was picking bluebells. The place where they found her was always a favorite. We built our tree house near there then, our sanctuary." With Amy the first in 1976, those whose faces were circled have all died, some when they were adults. Another odd thing; the photo shows 33 children, but there were only 32 in the class of '76. One of the children in the photo is smaller than the others. His face is blurred. Tom, a gloomy sort of lonely man, starts investigating.
Monroe: Class of '76 is a British two-part television mystery that leaves port with great promise and then slowly sinks. At times it seems to take forever to get to the conclusion, which turns out to be a flat, disappointing letdown. The writers created an eerie, intriguing and puzzling story...and then evidently realized they needed to find a way out of the set-up they'd created. They took a hurried, easy and unlikely route. It doesn't help that they had to fill about 150 minutes of screen story time. There's a lot of talk. There's a lot of watching Tom staring off into the distance while he reflects on his own sad issues. There's a major red herring that adds nothing to the plot but eats up time.
Why bother with this? First, Robert Carlyle. This Scot is an outstanding actor. He's not handsome. He's small and on the scrawny side. He's so good and so versatile that he brings interest to just about any movie he's in. He does here. Second, the movie's gloom and eeriness comes through. Monroe: Class of '76 is well photographed and edited. Third, the set-up: People murdered after a class picture was taken of them as school kids...a mysterious additional child in that picture no one seems able to identify...and the murders are continuing. For me, these three elements were hard to resist.
I stayed with the movie to the end. The conclusion, plus the sluggishness, turns the movie to two stars from four. Still, I like Carlyle. I'll make it three stars.
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