'Murder Mystery 2' Review

When I’m watching a new movie, I always bring a small notebook and jot down observations and things I want to mention in my final written review. Usually, I fill up about a page or two with bullet points, most of them almost illegible due to me having to write them in the dark while still trying to look at the screen so as not to miss anything potentially important.

But for Murder Mystery 2, now available on Netflix, I wrote only two lines: “Happy Madison logo usually signals a movie being cheap and artificial” and “bad jet ski greenscreen.” Both of those observations were made within the first five minutes, and neither of them required much critical thinking on my part. For the next eighty minutes, I just sat in my chair and watched the movie with as much attentiveness as a student during the last class before Spring Break.

There were definitely things that happened in the movie: people got killed, Sandler and Aniston did their usual married couple banter, and the mystery was resolved through some sort of twist ending. But for the life of me, I can’t recount anything else more specific than that. I was neither fully entertained nor bored, neither liking nor hating what I was watching and probably was somewhere between asleep and awake during long stretches. That’s the Netflix national anthem at this point, with 90% of their content just being the air that fills the room, with the other 10% that is worth your time (The Irishman, The Meyerowitz Stories, Private Life) being suffocated into relative obscurity.

This is also why, in an act of full transparency, the information provided in the screener email is doing most of the heavy lifting in this next paragraph that summarizes the setup for the main plot.

Nick and Audrey Spitz are now full-time detectives after solving the case in the first movie (I’ll give $100 to anyone that can remember how that movie ended). They’re about as competent as you would think, which is why they gleefully accept an invitation from The Maharajah (also from the first movie) to his wedding on a luxurious island. But the circumstances that seem too good to be true turn out to be exactly that, as the couple finds themselves framed for murder. They must now clear their name once again and unveil the real killer (or killers).

I feel like I’m not properly doing my job as a critic by keeping this review so brief, but there’s really not much else to say. If you’re the type of person who wants to watch something like this, then you’re not likely to be stopped by a bad review. And if you’re someone who isn’t immediately clamoring to see this, then there won’t be any good reviews to convince you otherwise. It doesn’t matter which bucket you fall into, as no one is going to be thinking about (let alone talking about) this movie by Monday.