Murder Mystery 2

When Adam Sandler signed a four-film deal with Netflix in 2014, it felt like a surrender. Sandler was approaching 50 and there were obvious doubts over his ability to keep putting up big box office numbers, typically for PG-13 comedies that Sony would release wide just about every summer. With twenty years of leading man duties to his name, Sandler had already endured longer than just about any comedic movie star in history and he had done so with little reinvention or departure from his tried and true formulas. Critics just about never liked his signature vehicles, but the public just about never cared and the only time the movies failed to hit $100 million domestic were when Sandler ventured into R-rated territory (mostly, modestly-budgeted projects with more artistic prospects than commercial ones) or took the lunacy to extremes (Little Nicky, Jack and Jill).

Today, Sandler looks like a cunning genius thank to that Netflix deal which was one large step ahead of the industry. Nearly a decade later, virtually no A-list talent on either side of the camera has declared themselves too important or cinematically pure to team with Netflix or the growing slate of competing streamers. Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, Guillermo del Toro, the Coen Brothers, the Russo Brothers, Adam McKay, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Sandra Bullock, Meryl Streep, Mark Wahlberg, Ryan Reynolds, Kevin Hart, Dwayne Johnson. The list of entertainers willing to accept bigger budgets and more creative freedom in exchange for a less traditional theatrical release is near endless. Holdouts touting the sanctity of the conventional moviegoing experience — Christopher Nolan, Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise — grow fewer in number and quieter in their opposition each passing year.

Meanwhile, Sandler and Netflix extended their innovative deal in early 2020, adding four movies for $275 million, with both sides appearing likely to extend the partnership even further given how successful it’s been (a 2020 figure from Netflix calculated that mankind has spent over two billion hours watching Sandler’s movies on the service) and how critical streaming has become to production cycles, with theatrical attendance still failing to return to pre-pandemic levels. What initially seemed like the concession that Sandler could no longer reliably draw crowds to multiplexes (private thinking that came to light in emails leaked in the 2014 Sony hack) has since evolved into Hollywood at large acknowledging that no actor can reliably pull off that feat anymore. Box office success today almost entirely relies upon brands that are carefully established, cultivated, and extended. Keanu Reeves, Vin Diesel, and Tom Holland may feel great when a John Wick, Fast, or Spider-Man movie soars in theaters, but no studio is giving any of them carte blanche and a nine-figure budget to do whatever else they may want.

Sandler remains as big a star as any of those actors. He may not be picking up MTV Movie Award nominations or earning Monday morning headlines for yet another #1 opening, but his relevance is not even slightly in question as the masses continue to find and enjoy his movies from the comfort of their homes, not having to pay an additional cent over their existing monthly Netflix subscription to do so. In the summer of 2019, Murder Mystery became Netflix’s most-watched movie ever, drawing more than 30 million views in its first three days of availability. It logged another 4 million hours viewed just last week, enough to rank 6th among all Netflix offerings, in anticipation of this week’s probably inevitable Murder Mystery 2.

While Sandler has repeatedly garnered praise for his infrequent forays into more artistic fare (including the Netflix-produced The Meyerowitz Stories and Hustle and Netflix-magnified Uncut Gems), the Murder Mystery franchise involves a minimum of the actor stretching his creative muscles. This is strictly mass consumption Sandler, requiring little thought from the funnyman and even less from the audience.

Four years after they became the principal unravelers of a series of high society murders on a private yacht, Manhattan married couple Nick (Sandler) and Audrey Spitz (Jennifer Aniston) are struggling to get their private eye business in the black. The Spitzes leap at the last-minute invitation to the Parisian wedding from the wealthy idiot Maharajah (Adeel Akhtar, still borrowing Ali G’s old shtick) they met on that ill-fated yacht.

At the opulent ceremony, the Maharajah gets kidnapped and his new bodyguard stabbed to death, leaving the Spitzes to again declare that everyone in attendance is a potential suspect. That includes the Maharajah’s local bride (Inglourious Basterds star Mélanie Laurent), sister (Kuhoo Verma), and one-armed former bodyguard (John Kani, returning). There’s also a jilted ex (Jodie Turner-Smith) and a lustful former soccer player (Enrique Arce). Heading up the investigation and again casting major suspicion over our American leads is Conner Miller (Mark Strong), a master negotiator and counterterrorism expert who literally wrote the book on being a detective.

The comedy is stale and, more often than not, inane. There’s a throwaway OJ Simpson joke a quarter-century after the far better one in the coutroom climax of the still highly entertaining Big Daddy. While Sandler usually deserves some blame for the feeble material in his movies (he is a credited writer on such lows as The Ridiculous 6, The Week Of, and the aforementioned Jack and Jill), he officially had no hand in this screenplay. Like its predecessor, Murder Mystery 2 has a script attributed purely to James Vanderbilt. You might recognize Vanderbilt’s names from David Fincher’s Zodiac and the warmly-received last two Scream movies. Despite that, he doesn’t seem to have any reservations writing dumb gags for Netflix and Sandler.

Murder Mystery 2 benefits from all the goodwill that Sandler and Aniston have earned over the past thirty-plus years, from ’90s “Saturday Night Live” and “Friends” through various comedy classics and their two breezy prior collaborations. If you were to replace our leads with, say, Rob Schneider and Fran Drescher or David Spade and Debra Messing, there’s a great chance this same material would be downright unwatchable (not to mention, far less widely watched). But even as they test the limits of their rampant likability, Sandler and Aniston somehow hang on to our sympathy and keep us somewhat invested in this decidedly mundane whodunnit.

This film lacks the moderate charm and entertainment value of last fall’s George Clooney-Julia Roberts romcom Ticket to Paradise, but it evokes similar feelings with its relatively harmless screwball shtick carried out by longtime big name entertainers.

Critics who have never given all that much thought or recognition to Sandler’s star vehicles over the year will lazily declare that he’s still making movies the same way he always has. That’s not true. The large cadre of cronies who have contributed countless supporting roles to Happy Madison Productions over the decades — Schneider, Spade, Chris Rock, Steve Buscemi, Tim Meadows, Dan Patrick, Shaq, Rachel Dratch, Allen Covert, etc., etc. — are nowhere to be found in either this or the first Murder Mystery. That seems less a product of coincidence and more of calculation, as the diverse cast is comprised of actors who hail from all over the world. By Hollywood standards, the star power beyond our leads is relatively non-existent, which makes it even easier for Sandler and Aniston to get chuckles and not have to share.

Netflix won’t report budget information and who knows how their pricey Sandler deal even factors into the production costs. As of today, the company is worth $146 billion, so I don’t think anyone is sweating any of this, even after they asked Sandler to relocate Hustle from China to Spain because they do not conduct business in the former country. With their number of subscribers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa recently eclipsing those in the US and Canada, I’m sure Netflix had no objections to this sequel being set almost entirely in Paris.

Screened for critics some thirty hours or so before it debuts on streaming devices everywhere, Murder Mystery 2 is the fourteenth Sandler movie I’ve seen on the big screen and comes just over twenty-seven years after my first — Happy Gilmore on President’s Day Weekend ’96. It has been interesting — and a tad disappointing — to see Sandler evolve from the bold, anarchic punk rock comedy of his early work to unchallenging fare like this, seemingly aimed at dads and kids and unlikely to offend anyone were it playing in some cool waiting room with a Netflix login. There’s no doubt that Sandler can dazzle at will when teaming with higher caliber auteurs, as the still very vocal fanbase of the Safdie Brothers’ Uncut Gems will attest to. But sometimes the Sandman just wants to goof around in Paris and get paid. To do so for a guaranteed huge global audience with an old friend like Aniston in tow is all the more enjoyable. Don’t be surprised if we get a Murder Mystery 3 in a few years.