‘Murder Mystery’ Lacks Any Real Intrigue Or Cleverness To Honor Its Agatha Christie Inspiration [Review]

Employing nimble meta fingers to play around with Agatha Christie tropes in contemporary Europe, the latest Adam Sandler/Netflix collaboration could’ve endlessly riffed on a something it never acknowledges: Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston, America’s eternal schmuck and its ageless beacon of beauty, playing a couple of 15 years. Suspension of disbelief breaks immediately and there’s an opportunity to explore your incredulity. Sadly, the film doesn’t bother attempting a self-deprecating savaging of this farfetched set-up and it’s a shame, cause there could’ve been worthwhile comedy there.

Directed by Kyle Newacheck from a James Vanderbilt script, Netflix’s “Murder Mystery” begins with Nick and Audrey Spitz finally making good on a years-delayed promise of honeymooning across the Atlantic, but before they’ve even arrived the lines of realism begin to shift. On the long plane ride, they meet Luke Evans’ Charles Cavendish, sporting a charisma transplanted from the upper-class world of “Downton Abbey.” His introduction injects mystery and a sense of devilish intention into a story that, up until this point, has relied on the familiar formula of one-liner jokes and the dwindling of life opportunities is a long-simmering marriage.

It would be off-putting if the movie hadn’t hinted at its own intentions a few minutes before, with the camera pulled up tight on Audrey reading an Agatha Christine novel and Nick promptly commenting on it, just in case we missed the visual cue.

The rest of “Murder Mystery” – which mires the Spitzs in international scandal and fish-out-of-water shenanigans – sees the movie put on several different hats. It ping-pongs between varying brands of humor – most obviously, Sandler’s brash candidness and parody of old-school, well, murder mysteries – without ever really going all in on one or the either.

At the same time, Vanderbilt’s screenplay makes obvious attempts at pure suspense that are never as punchy as he’d like them to be. Though the more he succeeds, the more the movie feels tonally imbalanced. Mysterious characters have a tendency to turn up at the most mysterious of times with an admittedly delightful lack of subtlety, but Vanderbilt can never quite create a believable balance in writing them as scheming murderers in one moment and silly caricatures the next.

Sandler and Aniston should be credited, though, for bringing enough comedic chops to keep “Murder Mystery” from being totally devoid of humor. As a drama, you’d be better off not expecting something that matches against, say, “Zodiac” (an earlier Vanderbilt screenplay that much more deftly shades the margins of its dark heart with humor). But when it comes to pure humor, the movie’s an acceptable bit of fun for a Netflix offering and, importantly, not overlong.

The movie seems constantly at a tug-of-war with itself, but sometimes that works to its benefit, particularly when it comes to the juxtaposition of Sandlerisms and the high-class weirdness Nick and Audrey are enveloped into. There’s a charm that shines through at points – an effective bit of timing from Aniston, an off-the-cuff comment from Sandler – that hints at what “Murder Mystery” could have been if it focused on its comedic elements; there’s an awkward, yet enticing, creative spirit in mixing the leads’ urban, modern spirit with the antiquated environment around them, like sprinkling skittles into caviar.

And even though the screenplay ultimately doesn’t give either of them the space to make good on that potential, watching the movie will hardly make you roll your eyes, either. The Sandler apologist and Sandler derider won’t have to come to blows over what the actor is doing in “Murder Mystery.” In fact, this actually might be the rare opportunity for them to break bread; Sandler outshines the rest of the cast in being able to balance the bleak and the hilarious.

You can recognize the patterns in the plot of “Murder Mystery” fairly easily, and might even be able to correctly solve the whodunit. But that appeal lies in being able to keep in lockstep with the film’s twists and turns; in the end, it asks us to switch off and switch on different parts of our brain with much too inconsistent a pace so as us to prevent from ever really tuning into its dramatic frequencies for prolonged stretches.

In keeping with the movie’s mission of being many things at once – a rom-com, a thriller, a low-budget actioner – “Murder Mystery” also makes an honest if flat attempt at sentimentality that, admirably, is never meant to be taken as an emotional core so much as a springboard for an action-packed finale. It would be surprising, too, if it felt like the mystery’s ultimate destination didn’t seem as if it was picked out of a hat of potential endings. Things were always going to tidy up a bit too nicely for a story so bloodlessly violent; it just mattered that we smiled and laughed along the way. [C-]