The first “Murder Mystery” from 2019, written by James Vanderbilt (“Zodiac”), was a fun star-studded throwback to the 1980s Agatha Christie films like 1982’s “Evil Under the Sun,” with salt of the earth Brooklynites Nick and Audrey Spitz (Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston) thrown into the mix. The script was a smart, genre-savvy affair coupled with Sandler-style lowbrow comedy, a combination that almost worked, but was undone by the lackluster direction by Kyle Newacheck. Unfortunately, its follow-up, also written by Vanderbilt and this time directed by Jeremy Garelick, (“The Wedding Ringer”), leans even more into comedy and current trend of billionaire fantasyland settings, rather than good old-fashioned mystery. Like its lazy title, “Murder Mystery 2” settles for the lowest version of itself.
Set a few years after the first film, ex-cop Nick and ex-hairdresser Audrey have now started their own private detective agency, putting all of their life savings on the line. The business is not faring well and neither is their marriage. When their billionaire friend the Maharajah (Adeel Akhtar), whom they met in the previous film, invites them to his wedding on his own private island the couple jump at the chance for an all-expenses paid getaway.
Once there they’re greeted by CGI flamingos and giraffes wearing diapers, as well as the Maharajah’s bride Claudette (Mélanie Laurent), his ex-fiancé the Countess (Jodie Turner-Smith), his sister Saira (Kuhoo Verma), and the board of directors for his company (Enrique Arce). When his new bodyguard Mr. Lou (Larry Myo Leong) is murdered and the Maharajah kidnapped, Nick and Audrey partner with the man who literally “wrote the book” on being a detective, Connor Miller (Mark Strong), and head to Paris to rescue him. Of course, everyone is a suspect – including Nick and Audrey – who once again become “Europe’s Most Wanted Criminals”.
The rest of the film unfolds exactly as you’d expect, with Sandler and Aniston thrust into run-of-the-mill action sequences while bickering with each other in the kind of fast-talking banter they established in the first film. These fish-out-of-water characters are meant to be the audience surrogate in this world of opulence. They’re wowed by the Maharajah’s generosity – which mostly comes in the form of extravagant gifts like new iPhones, expensive jewelry, and even a pair of original Air Jordans. The only thing anyone in this upper echelon cares about is money and materialism.
This is supposed to be a contrast to Nick and Audrey, whose livelihood is floundering because they invested in their newfound passion for sleuthing. While they are mostly terrible at it, they will of course solve this crime – just as they did the first one. But where the first film saw the finding of their calling to be their reward for solving the big mystery, the sequel finds no such internal reward as enough. Instead, by the end it posits the only real reward is a large wad of cash that brings Nick and Audrey closer to the ranks of the ultra-wealthy they’re supposed to be contrasted against.
Thematically “Murder Mystery 2” finds itself in conversation with other media set in the world of billionaires, from Netflix’s own “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” to HBO’s “The White Lotus” to best picture nominee “Triangle of Sadness”. All of these projects aim to satirize the filthy rich, but fall into the trap of mostly basking in the opulence of their realm, too immersed in the luxury to actually critique the financial systems at play. Instead it’s the individuals who are portrayed as greedy or evil, thus mostly letting the systems off the hook. This way the fantasy idea that if a good-hearted, middle class American couple like Nick and Audrey make it into this world, they’ve earned their way there. This is the American dream writ large on a global stage.
The biggest tension in the film is actually the way in which Vanderbilt’s script seems to look down on people like Nick and Audrey even as it tries to exalt them. When Audrey first meets Parisian Claudette on the private island, she says that Paris is her favorite city. But when asked when she was last there, Audrey reveals she’s never actually been, she just loves it from the movies set there. Although the action will shift to Paris in the second half of the film, fulfilling Audrey’s dream to visit her “favorite” city, this moment plays like a barb towards the exact kind of audience – someone who has seen Paris only in films, but loves it for the fantasy it represents – the film is made for.
Yet these sequences that fulfill this fantasy are filmed so poorly, the audience would be better off watching literally any other film set in Paris. Most of these scenes – including the finale atop the Eiffel Tower – are set at night and suffer from the same underlit cinematography that plagues much of contemporary cinema. It begs the question: why go through the motions of choreographing these fantasy roleplay James Bond-style action set pieces for Nick and Audrey, only to film them so dark that they’re practically unwatchable. If the film exists solely as fantasy for middle America, the least the filmmaker could do is make all of it a picturesque one.
Ultimately, “Murder Mystery 2” is the movie equivalent of an airport paperback novel. It serves as an escape for the audience from the humdrum of modern existence through the fantastical adventures of these two “average” Americans. It’s fitting, then, that the franchise is led by Aniston and Sandler, who have spent most of their careers, despite their wealth, projecting this very idea that they are just ordinary people like the rest of us. Which makes the very last scene in the film all the more chilling, as it leaves the billionaires in a magnanimous light and paints a working class snatch-and-grab guy from Jersey as the real obstacle that is keeping Nick and Audrey in their dire financial place. Bleak. [D+]