Murder Mystery 2 (2023)
Murder Mystery 2 and its 2019 predecessor, Murder Mystery try to be intriguing on the line of Agatha Christie or Mary Roberts Reinhart and funny on the line of the Thin Man movies, only with a wider variety of liquid imbibements. “Try” is the operative word, though. My son and I watched these movies back to back last night, and while we had a good time, something felt…off.
The first movie saw married couple Nick and Audrey go on a romantic European vacation only to be framed for the murder of an elderly billionaire and caught in a web of intrigue with all the requisite red herrings. A lot of the movie is built somehow around Audrey looking for Claritin for her allergies, which as an allergy sufferer I totally relate to, but as a plot device it seems a wee bit thin.
Round Two sees Nick and Audrey as guests at a wedding on a private island, where the groom gets kidnapped and everyone is a suspect, including Nick and Audrey. Naturally, money is the motive, and like the first movie there are the proverbial red herrings, but unlike the first movie there’s no dogged hunt for Claritin.
Yeah. Except for some scene changes, not to mention the fact that between the first and the second movies Nick and Audrey have opened their own detective agency, there’s really only one Murder Mystery. Nick and Audrey are always scrappy but romantic. There’s a guy named Colonel Ulenga who seems to slowly be losing body parts (He had a missing hand in the first movie, and then in the second his whole arm is gone. What he loses next is anyone’s guess.) In each movie Nick and Audrey give chase to the villains in the highest of high-end fancy sports cars, the only difference being that the second time Nick is driving. And of course there’s at least one big confrontation scene where Nick and Audrey present their findings and all the characters either look guilty and try to bolt or sit silently waiting for it to all play out.
Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston are the last people I expected to pair up in a film, but they’re both goofballs in their own way, which kinda works. I just wish 2 showed a little bit more of Nick and Audrey solving mysteries for their detective agency so we can see how much their characters have progressed between the two films. Instead, we just get a passing mention and a little bit of name-dropping.
I think the main problem with these movies is they can’t decide whether they want to be a spoof, an homage, or just do their own thing, and that’s why they come across as a little flat. Sandler and Aniston deserve better than this, especially since we know what they can do.
Still, the movies are not a complete waste of time and I hope we see additional installments. Murder Mystery and Murder Mystery 2 might not be anywhere near Christie, Reinhart, or Nick and Nora, but they’re a step in the right direction, especially if future installments have more variation in plot lines and more fleshed out characters.
Murder Mystery 2 is currently streaming on Netflix. Rated PG-13.
My grade: B-
Principal cast: Adam Sandler, Jennifer Aniston, Mark Strong, Melanie Laurent, Jodie Turner-Smith, John Kani, Kuhoo Verma, Dany Boon, Adeel Akhtar, Enrique Arce, Jillian Bell
Directed by James Garelick.
Written by James Vanderbilt.