MURDER MYSTERY 2 (2023)

MURDER MYSTERY 2 (2023)

Tagline: Deux or die.

(Mystery, Action, Let’s Go to The Eiffel Tower) [PG-13]

I'm married to this lady. Everything's a negotiation. I got it.

In this one, Nick and Audrey have started a detective service that had gained negative notoriety and really isn’t going well. They end up getting invited to their friend Maharaja’s gigantic out of control super luxurious wedding where it doesn’t take long before someone is murdered and he is kidnapped. For these two, it sounds like the perfect case. 

One thing that is pretty clear off the bat is that Adam Sandler (THE WEDDING SINGER) and Jennifer Aniston (LEPRECHAUN) have pretty good chemistry together. I am not saying it’s as good as him and Drew Barrymore (FIRESTARTER), but it’s pretty good. This thing is meant to be just a fun little action comedy with a bit of mystery and it knocks those goals out of the park. Are the stunts totally out of control? Yes. Is it likely that Nick can actually take such a beating and still live? Very unlikely? Is it possible that the insurmountable amount of damage these two cause is just totally forgivable? Absolutely not (well maybe in some cities). However, none of that is meant to be taken seriously, this is a full-blown action comedy and if you can’t embrace that, then this movie is probably not for you.

The actual movie part of the movie is a brisk 79 minutes long and that might be part of why the pacing feels so on point. There isn’t a lot of time wasted between the start of the film and when things really get going in a hilarious direction. For some reason to this point, Adam Sandler has never done a sequel, but I am guessing the first installment in this series was probably fairly well-received so why not? I don’t know? He does have a giant contract with Netflix so perhaps it was just less risky to expand on an idea that had already been presented than to try and come up with a completely different storyline. 

When it comes to the cast we get some real treats here. Mark Strong (JOHN CARTER) plays Miller who is brought in to kind of clean up the mess after the wedding goes haywire and find the Maharaja. His performance isn’t all that outside of his wheelhouse, but he’s sensational. John Kani (BLACK PANTHER) is great as Colonel Ulenga reprising his role from the first installment in the series. Kuhoo Verma is awesome with the screen time she gets as Saira. She hasn’t been in a ton of stuff, but hopefully, this will help that. Adeel Akhtar (ENOLA HOLMES 2) is pretty funny as the Maharaja. Jodie Turner-Smith (The Last Ship) doesn’t get a lot of screen time either, but she’s pretty convincing this her role as Countess Sekou. She is also married to one of my favorite actors Joshua Jackson (Fringe) but I do wish that dude was doing a least one role where he isn’t cheating on someone. I didn’t like Mélanie Laurent (NOW YOU SEE ME) as Claudette in this, but I am sure she’s much better in other stuff. She appeared to not even want to be on set but who knows. We also get a Jillian Bell (EUREKA) sighting. It’s never a bad idea to find a way to sneak her into your movie. 

Some thoughts on this may boil down to if you like Adam Sandler or not, but overall I enjoyed this. What was not well done was the actual mystery. I think if you are going to call a film mystery anything, you need to at least write one that makes some sort of sense or draws the audience in. If there is one failure here it’s that there are episodes of SCOOBY-DOO MYSTERY INCORPORATED that have more complicated mysteries than this thing. 

Overall MURDER MYSTERY 2 gets a 4 out of 7. A toned-down version might have made a really fun family movie night, but what we got certainly didn’t suck.
 

GRAPHICS ARE THE PROPERTY OF ECHO FILMS AND ARE USED FOR REVIEW PURPOSES ONLY.