Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston are on the trail of whodunnit – again. The sequel to the wildly successful Netflix movie Murder Mystery sees Nick and Audrey set up their own detective agency and, when trouble inevitably comes calling, so, too the pair of sleuths in various exotic locations.
While Mark Strong joins the cast as a hardened ex-MI6 agent, it appears it doesn’t shake up enough of a formula to woo critics – even if the pair of leads impress.
"Murder Mystery 2 is what we used to call a TV-movie, and now a streaming movie — a genial formulaic package, with two stars who aren’t exactly about to topple Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert," Variety writes. "Yet Sandler and Aniston mesh; they made you believe in Nick and Audrey’s cantankerous marriage, and in the love percolating just beneath the fighting."
"It’s made just-about-watchable by Sandler and Aniston again, whose combined movie star charm proves magnetic enough to carry us through the flatter moments, both nailing some effectively chaotic physical comedy and maintaining a warm, relaxed chemistry," The Guardian notes in its three-star review.
Some reviews, however, are a little more withering. The Hollywood Reporter compares the detective comedy to Rian Johnson’s Knives Out series – and it’s not favorable: "Arriving on the heels of Netflix’s far superior Agatha Christie send-up Glass Onion, Murder Mystery 2 will nonetheless be another hit for the streamer. One just hopes that with the next installment, they focus a little less on the production values and a lot more on the comedy." Ouch.
Murder Mystery 2 also gets three stars – is this the most three-star movie of all time? – in The Independent ("No one involved in Murder Mystery 2 seems to have worked with any real sense of direction, since the film is more than happy to let Sandler and Aniston take the steering wheel," critic Clarisse Loughrey observes), while Radio Times dishes out two stars, saying, "Mark Strong gives a winning performance in an otherwise derivative, juvenile and occasionally offensive sequel."
