Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Murder Mystery,” a cheeky pasteboard detective thriller-meets-middle-aged-romance that became a huge hit for Netflix four years ago, had the inspiration to team Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston as Nick and Audrey Spitz, a dweeby-sweet New York couple — he was a cop trying, and failing, to get promoted to detective; she was a hairdresser — whose marriage-on-auto-pilot needed a dose of shock therapy.
They got it when they went on the European getaway that Nick, a compulsive cheapskate, had been promising Audrey for 15 years.
The two wound up on a yacht, at a geezer aristocrat’s party, which turned out to be his death sentence as the moment he cut everyone there out of his will. “Murder Mystery 2,” like “Murder Mystery” before it, is an agreeably slapdash casserole.
The first film was an Agatha Christie knockoff, a kind of “Murder on the Idiot Express” with the two American rubes stepping in for Hercule Poirot (though the movie had a token Poirot figure as well).
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