Murder Mystery 2 – Film Review

Now full-time detectives struggling to get their private eye agency off the ground, Nick and Audrey Spitz find themselves at the center of an international abduction when their friend the Maharaja is kidnapped at his own lavish wedding.

For some reason, it seems as though quite a fair amount of people ended up watching Kyle Newacheck‘s 2019 comedy film Murder Mystery for it to warrant a sequel directed by Jeremy Garelick, who’s biggest career highlight is the admittedly great The Hangover, which he did an uncredited re-write of.

There’s really no harm to be done even with a bad comedy, and unfortunately, that’s what this is. You’re not going to hate your life and regret all of your life decisions when watching this, but you’ll likely have a fairly boring viewing experience, unless you absolutely loved the first.

In terms of enjoyment, it’s essentially the same for me this second time around. I didn’t really enjoy it all that much. What I will say is an improvement this time around is how quickly the story kicks into gear. The previous film has a bunch of set-up scenes until the actual murder happens, whereas in the sequel, things get going almost immediately.

Sadly, though, this movie’s painfully short running time makes it feel outrageously rushed. Without credits, this film runs at a breezy seventy-nine minutes which is honestly astounding. This leaves us with almost no room for the characters to grow or develop, and it means that nearly the entirety of the movie is loaded with corny one-liners.

Or, if it’s not a one-liner, we’re watching Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler having, yet again, some of the worst chemistry I’ve seen in a comedy in a long time. They simply do not feel like a believable couple, and no matter how hard I tried to see them as their characters Audrey and Nick Spitz, I just couldn’t.

There are a handful of moments sprinkled throughout that managed to make me chuckle and smile, but these moments are so few and far between and I was left wanting a whole lot more of them because at the end of the day, this film is devoid of any real substance or entertainment value.

It’s the definition of a movie you’d probably put on in the background and not really pay too much attention to. But that’s a real shame considering how talented most of the people who worked on this movie are.

Seriously – James Vanderbilt wrote this movie. The same guy who’s responsible for writing Ready or Not and the two most recent Scream movies and yet the script here straight up sucks. Let’s just hope that if we ever get a third Murder Mystery that they go back to the drawing board.

While it has some minor improvements over its predecessor, Murder Mystery 2 is still an extremely bland and terribly unfunny mess that suffers tremendously from poor pacing.