Murder Mystery (2019) - Movie Review

Having covered all of the previous Happy Madison Netflix features, I freely admit that I didn’t go into this film expecting anything all that decent. And sure enough, in record time, that feeling of déjà vu kicks in with the usual hallmarks of an Adam Sandler production: Prominent in-your-face product placement with the Amazon gift card (wow, is this not a good time to be shilling out for them), Sandler’s wife being cast in a role meant to show off how hot she is (she’s literally billed as ‘Great Looking Flight Attendant’), and the story as a whole is a thinly-veiled excuse for a European vacation, just like the last time Sandler and Jennifer Aniston got together with Just Go With It.

But beyond the usual Sandlerisms, this film is presented as a comedic murder mystery, with Sandler’s policeman and Aniston’s murder-novel-obsessed hairdresser put into the spotlight to solve it. While watching this, I kept getting flashbacks to a particular episode of Married With Children where Al winds up playing detective on his own murder mystery. Partly because that one also kept framing the obvious outsider (the American ‘detective’) as the culprit to everyone but the audience, but also because they share the notion of a wisecracking lead character being put into a murder mystery that is intentionally filled with stereotypes of the genre. Oh, and they both start with the victim about to declare something in their will, only for the lights to conveniently go out and only go back on when they're murdered. Yeah. It's that clichéd.

Knowing the usual writers that get tapped for Sandler films nowadays, the genre trappings being this plain and this obvious would usually be par for the course. Coming from James Vanderbilt, the writer of Zodiac and Truth, I’ll admit to being slightly disappointed by how this whole thing turns out. Given Sandler’s involvement in the production fairly later on in its life cycle, I don’t mind him basically riffing on the plot as it is (most likely with his own ad-libs, something he does regularly in these films), but the plot itself is bad mystery writing.

While Vanderbilt manages to deliver some decent writing moments, like how the stereotype of ‘the butler did it’ plays into the narrative, the story itself banks on clues that we’re told about, rather than shown. Even considering how exposition-heavy the ending reveal ends up being in these stories, which holds true for this one, this is pretty weak and it makes caring all that much about the mystery itself nigh-on impossible. It basically breaks one of the golden rules: It doesn’t factor in that all of the events of the mystery are taking place in front of an audience, so all of the clues we get are insular and just barely keep the continuity of the plot going, only without letting any of us join in on the supposed fun.

I will admit one thing, though: This is easily the least painful Sandler Netflix effort I’ve sat through thus far. It doesn’t carry the genuine heart of films like Sandy Wexler or even The Week Of, but his actual character here, a policeman too scared to tell his wife he isn’t an actual detective yet, is the furthest he’s gotten in years from his usual uber-successive stock character. Hell, his place as the outsider making fun of what’s going on around him is the best part of this whole thing, as he actually manages to land some decent one-liners. I particularly like the utter shambles of an ending reveal we get here where he eventually just goes ‘Maybe it was us after all!’; fair cop, that gave me a chuckle.

But outside of him, Aniston playing along to alright effect and Luke Evans winning major points early on for his quipping about the English way of doing things, there’s not much here to recommend. It’s not outright awful, like what I’m come to expect from these films nowadays, it’s just bland with a few okay elements to it. It’s sad when I look at this and have to give it sympathy points because it isn’t as bad as crap like The Ridiculous 6 or The Do-Over; that shouldn’t be considered a bar to reach.