Movie 22 - Murder Mystery 2 (2023), Dir. Jeremy Garelick.
The movie follows Nick and Audrey Spitz (Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston), who are a couple that get entangled in murders and solve them only after a lot of people have died.
There has to be a genre specifically for movies that are a comedy/parody version of other genres because this movie has very little comedy, and the murder-solving angle is a joke.
I saw the first part during the pandemic because I had nothing else to do, and honestly, it wasn't that bad. It had a decent story that was clearly a rip-off of Knives Out (2019, Dir. Rian Johnson). The cast was alright, and the story was easy to follow. The number of murders calculated before they solved the case was 5, which was hilarious, as 5 is just a huge number in this situation. The twist where the murderer is actually someone else after the decoy was caught was pretty good. It was good, but the chemistry between the main characters and the jokes were occasionally good.
The second movie:
Adam and Jennifer have almost no chemistry in the movie, they are shown to be constantly fighting, and not agreeing which is not fun to see from a couple. They do not work together at all, and the majority of the time they seem to be on different pages. The rest of the cast is dull, no one really stands out, which makes it difficult to find out who the killer might be.
The movie has issues with predictability. After the first movie, the second movie became predictable as the killer who is shown to have such an elaborate plan and is pulling off crazy stunts is most definitely not the killer. The final killer reveal is anticlimactic as they do not have a unique personality that separates them from the other characters. The story of the Maharajah being kidnapped is very dumb, as a rich guy could not be kidnapped easily. Mark Strong had a decent role, but the script did him bad by giving him bad lines and a bad story. The pacing is very fast and does not give any background on the characters who are the possible suspects.
The film lacks the ability to allow for it to be a serious or a comedy film, with the jokes not landing due to the situation, and the serious situations are destroyed by jokes.
Adam and Jennifer are very talented actors, and it's sad seeing them in a movie that was written by people who think murder mystery means having fun and going on vacations.
If they were given a better script and backgrounds for the main and the side characters, it would definitely be more interesting to watch.
The movie would have been much better, for example, if Adam had an accident on the force that makes him use humor as a defense mechanism would ground his character and make him more likable rather than just being a goof that can barely do a thing without pissing anyone off and doesn't require luck. And for Jennifer, she is shown in both the movies to be smart and sharp, they could have built off of that and made her show off her skills more instead of making her look like a dumb blonde whose stuck with a useless husband.
Adam Sandler who is generally playing himself in all his movies feels very out of place in the film and does not seem to be happy. Jennifer Aniston is great actor and she also feels out of place in the movie.
The movie series could have been like the Knives Out series with the Husband-wife angle to it, but it fails to make the characters likable and unique.
The only thing I like in the movie was the Lamborghini and Colonel Ulanga (John Kani). He is the only character from both the movies that I like and who is funny to watch.
To conclude, the movie is somehow watchable at times, but at the end, it feels like a huge waste of time. The movie could have helped Netflix with their original movie fatigue, but somehow the fatigue continues. 2/10
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My next review is going to be Reminiscence (2021)
Check this out on Medium.
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