If you admire the blunt, descriptive simplicity of a movie title like “Murder Mystery,” then I suppose “Murder Mystery 2″ is right up your alley. The 2019 original stars Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston as a working class couple from New York — Nick and Audrey Spitz — who improbably found themselves stumbling into drama and intrigue among the super rich. The sequel reunites Sandler and Aniston once again as the cop and the hairstylist who have since ditched their day jobs to work as private investigators, but with little success. They need a win.
Or as the voice-over explains in the opening montage recap: “With business struggling, Nick and Audrey could only pray for a miracle: That someone close to them would be killed.” Not to put too fine a point on it! I actually like the winking spirit behind that line: Subtlety be damned! Too bad the movie mistakes frenzied comedy for style or even a point of view.
Nick and Audrey are bickering about their professional malaise when — plonk — an all-expenses paid wedding invitation arrives from their old friend Vikram (Adeel Akhtar), the maharaja of the first movie, and they’re off to an exclusive island somewhere for The Most Elaborate Wedding Ever. And wouldn’t you know it, mid-party, Vik’s head of security turns up dead. And then Vik himself is kidnapped.
“Calm down everyone, we do this for a living,” Audrey tepidly reassures the crowd, and soon enough a dashing British hostage negotiator in the form of Mark Strong emerges from the sea like a scuba-suited Bond girl and confidently takes over. Except the kidnappers insist on Nick and Audrey’s involvement, so everyone jets off to Paris to deliver the ransom.
If only the “Murder Mystery” films had any interest in creating characters for anyone to actually play. Or, failing that, at least some halfway funny dialogue to toss around. Screenwriter James Vanderbilt’s credits include the 2007 thriller “Zodiac” and a couple of “Scream” movies, all of which tap into various mystery conventions. Comedy, though, requires a finesse all its own — especially of the violently slapstick variety — and Vanderbilt’s maximalist instincts don’t send up or tweak the whodunit genre so much as reduce it to its lowest common denominator.
Aniston and Sandler seem game for anything. I just wish they were given something. Ding-dongs solving mysteries is a decent premise. But the house style of the movies is more celebrities-delivering-lines rather than its two leads committing to the camp of it all. That wouldn’t be such a glaring issue if there were a palpable sense of delight in the way they play off one another as actors to compensate.
Kyle Newacheck directed the first movie. Jeremy Garelick takes over this time out and retains the frenetic pacing. If you squint, you can see the farce buried within. After the initial discovery of the murdered body, Audrey and Nick head back to their lavish hotel suite and barricade themselves inside with heavy furniture. A series of visitors to their room sees them schlepping that furniture back and forth, over and over, and it’s a funny idea that flounders because it’s shot and edited with no sense of timing or blocking.
If nothing else, “Murder Mystery 2″ is consistent with its predecessor, at once expensive (the locations! the star salaries!) and somehow cheap-seeming, with a cacophonous “throw it at the wall and see what sticks” approach to mystery building. A Bollywood-esque dance number? Sure. Someone hanging precariously off the side of the Eiffel Tower? Why not?
Then again, why single out any one creative choice when it feels like all the choices were made?
Both movies are obvious wealth-aganda. I think there are ways to give audiences that eye candy, wish fulfillment and all-in-good-fun lack of seriousness while also adhering to certain storytelling structures that give whodunits such a satisfying clockwork rhythm. Whereas “Murder Mystery 1 & 2″ are content to simply drop Nick and Audrey into one exclusive space after another, like floundering extras crashing a season of “The White Lotus.”
That just might be the selling point.
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'MURDER MYSTERY 2'
1.5 stars (out of 4)
Rated: PG-13 (for violence, bloody images, strong language, suggestive material and smoking)
Running time: 1:29
How to watch: Netflix
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