Film Review: Murder Mystery 2 lacks the wit of the original
Adam Sandler as Nick Spitz and Jennifer Aniston as Audrey Spitz in Murder Mystery 2.
- Murder Mystery 2
- ★★★☆☆
Four years on from their breakthrough success as a private investigating team, Nick (Adam Sandler) and Audrey Spitz (Jennifer Anniston) return in (12A), which opens with a botched surveillance job and the confirmation that the bickering duo aren’t exactly thriving as a professional concern.
Invited to their billionaire friend Rajah’s (Adeel Akhtar) wedding on a private island, Nick and Audrey arrive just in time to see Rajah’s bodyguard murdered and Rajah himself kidnapped.
Enter Miller (Mark Strong), a veteran hostage negotiator, whose first act is to declare that Nick and Audrey are top of his list of suspects...
Written by James Vanderbilt and directed by Jeremy Garelick, Murder Mystery 2 trundles merrily along as a spoof of the private eye genre, with the body count mounting and the slapstick gags coming thick and fast.
Dashiell Hammett’s Nick and Nora Charles provide the gold standard for married private eyes, and while Murder Mystery 2 falls a long way short of the razor-sharp repartee we associate with that couple, Aniston and Sandler are difficult to dislike as the hapless Audrey and Nick bumble their way through their latest investigation. (Netflix)
