The curious wrestle between pratfalls and pathos that’s made Adam Sandler’s career so increasingly fascinating has erred toward a win for the latter with age. The aggressive forgettability of his early Netflix deal output slowly faded into something more worthwhile with last year’s surprisingly textured basketball drama Hustle and simultaneously, we’ve seen the Safdies squeeze out his best work in Uncut Gems (the trio will collaborate again with a new film set in the world of sports memorabilia) and later this year he’ll star alongside Carey Mulligan in the offbeat sci-fi drama Spaceman. While a total ban on fart jokes is unlikely (he’s also set to star in a new Netflix comedy from the director of The Wrong Missy), his 10 for them, one for me ethos is definitely shifting.
Murder Mystery, his most watched Netflix film to date was one that didn’t exactly straddle these two halves but made for a more acceptable use of his sillier side, thanks greatly to the appearance of Jennifer Aniston. It was a breezy action comedy about a wannabe detective couple trying to solve a murder while on vacation, a low-stakes Friday night watch with medium rewards. The same could be said about the totally adequate follow-up out this week, so similar in every way that it feels as if we’ve just clicked “play next episode”.
In a post-Poker Face world (a throwback hour-long mystery-of-the-week show I have slight issues with but skillfully leaps through whodunnit beats with speed), this often feels like it would be better suited to a TV format as well, a simple script inelegantly stretched. The credits roll here before we’ve even reached the 80-minute mark but even that starts to feel padded, car chases and explosions serving to distract us from a murder mystery that’s criminally short on both.
This time, the couple is headed to an extravagant destination wedding (the film does, at the very least, boast multiple, non-green-screened locations, a genuine treat in the streaming era) to celebrate their friend Vikram (a returning Adeel Akhtar) and his marriage to a Parisian shopgirl-done-good (the ever-charming Mélanie Laurent). But, to their slight relief, chaos cuts things short with a murder and a kidnap, forcing them both on a brief adventure.
In the first outing, Sandler’s cop and Aniston’s hairdresser were desperate to be detectives and in the second, they’ve progressed somewhat to become unlicensed ones, flubbing their way through fourth-rate jobs involving potential cheating spouses. There’s something interestingly amoral about their opportunistic glee over a violent murder happening in front of them and how it might improve their careers and marriage but it’s also interestingly unexplored, returning screenwriter James Vanderbilt not wanting to make them anything other than extremely easy-to-like. The mystery they become entangled with isn’t really tangled enough, with a short suspect list (including Jodie Turner-Smith’s bitchy countess and Mark Strong’s super-detective) and a tired ransom plot that relies more on passable action set pieces than any real twists or suspense (the finale in particular is all flash and very little else).
It’s made just-about-watchable by Sandler and Aniston again, whose combined movie star charm proves magnetic enough to carry us through the flatter moments, both nailing some effectively chaotic physical comedy and maintaining a warm, relaxed chemistry. It might not give Sandler the sort of latter-day challenge we now know he can handle so well but it’s an easy win for the pair and for Netflix, the film sure to be another much-watched and endlessly followed-up sequel. I just wish the script had made things a little harder for them and for us, a murder mystery to be solved with eyes closed and watched with eyes elsewhere.
Murder Mystery 2 is now available on Netflix
