Review: Sandler, Aniston Reteam in ‘Murder Mystery 2’

Jennifer Aniston, left, and Adam Sandler arrive at the premiere of "Murder Mystery 2" on Tuesday, March 28, 2023, at the Regency Village Theatre in Los Angeles. (AP)
Jennifer Aniston, left, and Adam Sandler arrive at the premiere of "Murder Mystery 2" on Tuesday, March 28, 2023, at the Regency Village Theatre in Los Angeles. (AP)
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Review: Sandler, Aniston Reteam in ‘Murder Mystery 2’

Jennifer Aniston, left, and Adam Sandler arrive at the premiere of "Murder Mystery 2" on Tuesday, March 28, 2023, at the Regency Village Theatre in Los Angeles. (AP)
Jennifer Aniston, left, and Adam Sandler arrive at the premiere of "Murder Mystery 2" on Tuesday, March 28, 2023, at the Regency Village Theatre in Los Angeles. (AP)

You would have a hard time defending the limp plotting, the bland action-adventure set pieces or the Agatha Christie-light whodunit twists of the first “Murder Mystery.” And, yet, it was kind of good.

“Murder Mystery,” one of Netflix's most-streamed films, was chock full of exotic settings and mysterious murders. But the only thing that mattered, really, was the banter between Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler. Though “Murder Mystery” could be said to epitomize that very modern kind of passive and painless viewing experience on streaming platforms, their married couple was a throwback to a long-ago movie era. Audrey and Nick Spitz, a pair of working-class New Yorkers turned semi-amateur detectives, might as well be Nick and Nora Charles, the 1930s crime solvers.

“Murder Mystery” and its new sequel don't have anywhere near the sparkle of the “The Thin Man” movies, with William Powell, Myrna Loy and their wire fox terrier Asta. But like those films, everything in “Murder Mystery” and “Murder Mystery 2” is secondary, and distantly so, to the comic and sweet rapport between the Spitzes, a bickering but lovingly connected married couple. Like its predecessor, “Murder Mystery 2” is built on old-fashioned star power and the interplay between Sandler and Aniston. They’re good company to be in, and sometimes that’s enough.

Whether “Murder Mystery 2” meets that somewhat low bar will probably depend on just how casually you're watching it. For many, it may be enough to say that “Murder Mystery 2," which debuts Friday on Netflix, fits the bill as amiable background noise.

And this one, in which Jeremy Garelick (writer of “The Hangover”) takes over directing with James Vanderbilt returning to write the screenplay, starts out like a new season to a TV series, with a narrated recap of what the Spitzes have been up to since the last film. After their luck solving their first case, they've made themselves full-time private eyes. The clients aren't lining up, though, so it's welcome news when a friend from the first film, the Maharajah (Adeel Akhtar), calls up to invite them to his wedding and fly them out to his private island and then to Paris.

For those who have accused Sandler of using movies as an excuse to hang out with friends in beautiful locales, the “Murder Mystery” movies won't disappoint. This time, the action has been turned up a notch, especially once the Maharajah is kidnapped and an MI6 hostage negotiator (Mark Strong) shows up. Strong's potent presence lends some credibility to the mayhem, mostly in Paris, but he also gives Sandler and Aniston a straight man to bounce their jokes off of. Some of the gags are pretty dusty, even by “Thin Man” standards, including one Sandler line comparing marriage to hostage negotiations and a dance scene at an Indian wedding that's unlikely to draw any comparisons to “RRR.”

All of this may lend some scale to “Murder Mystery 2” but it's no help to the comedy. Despite that, good comic chemistry can be hard to come by, and Aniston — who's been wonderful in these films — and Sandler keep these films more entertaining than they should be.

Especially in recent years — a chilly period for big-screen comedies — the movies have struggled to figure out what do with bright, funny women like Aniston despite their abundant talent. Even in these decent-at-best comedies, her natural sense of timing is sharp and lively, and she and Sandler make a charming, easy-flowing duo. All they really need, to borrow a trick from Nick and Nora, is a dog.



Ari Aster Made a Movie About Polarized America. ‘Eddington’ Has Been Polarizing

Pedro Pascal, from left, director Ari Aster and Joaquin Phoenix pose for photographers at the photo call for the film "Eddington" at the 78th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, Saturday, May 17, 2025. (AP)
Pedro Pascal, from left, director Ari Aster and Joaquin Phoenix pose for photographers at the photo call for the film "Eddington" at the 78th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, Saturday, May 17, 2025. (AP)
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Ari Aster Made a Movie About Polarized America. ‘Eddington’ Has Been Polarizing

Pedro Pascal, from left, director Ari Aster and Joaquin Phoenix pose for photographers at the photo call for the film "Eddington" at the 78th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, Saturday, May 17, 2025. (AP)
Pedro Pascal, from left, director Ari Aster and Joaquin Phoenix pose for photographers at the photo call for the film "Eddington" at the 78th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, Saturday, May 17, 2025. (AP)

A Post-it note sat near Ari Aster while he wrote “Eddington”: “Remember the phones.”

“Eddington” may be set during the pandemic, but the onset of COVID-19 isn't its inciting incident. Outside the fictional New Mexico town, a data center is being built. Inside Eddington, its residents — their brains increasingly addled by the internet, social media, smartphones and whatever is ominously emanating from that data center — are growing increasingly detached from one another, and from each other’s sense of reality.

“We’re living in such a weird time and we forget how weird it is,” Aster says. “Things have been weird ever since we were able to carry the internet on our person. Ever since we began living in the internet, things have gotten weirder and weirder.”

“It’s important to keep reminding ourselves: This is weird.”

Moviegoers have grown accustomed to expecting a lack of normalcy in Aster's movies. His first three films — “Hereditary,” “Midsommar,” “Beau Is Afraid” — have vividly charted strange new pathways of dread and deep-rooted anxiety. Those fixations make Aster, a master of nightmare and farce, uniquely suited to capturing the current American moment.

“Eddington,” which A24 releases in theaters Friday, may be the most prominent American movie yet to explicitly wrestle with social and political division in the US. In a showdown between Joaquin Phoenix’s bumbling right-wing sheriff and Pedro Pascal’s elitist liberal mayor, arguments over mask mandates, Black Lives Matter protests and elections spiral into a demented Western fever dream.

At a time when our movie screens are filled with escapism and nostalgia, “Eddington” dares to diagnose something frightfully contemporary. Aster, in a recent interview at an East Village coffee shop he frequents, said he couldn’t imagine avoiding it. “To not be talking about it is insane,” he said.

“I’m desperate for work that’s wrestling with this moment because I don’t know where we are. I’ve never been here before,” says Aster. “I have projects that I’ve been planning for a long time. They make less sense to me right now. I don’t know why I would make those right now.”

Predictably polarizing

“Eddington,” appropriately enough, has been divisive. Since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Aster’s film has had one of the most polarizing receptions of the year among critics. Even in Cannes, Aster seemed to grasp its mixed response. “I don’t know what you think,” he told the crowd.

Some critics have suggested Aster's film is too satirical of the left. “Despite a pose of satirical neutrality, he mainly seems to want to score points off mask-wearers, young progressives, anti-racists and other targets beloved of reactionaries,” wrote The New Yorker’s Justin Chang. For The New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote: “Aster knows how to grab your attention, but if he thinks he’s saying something about America, the joke is on him.”

Aster was expecting a divisive reaction. But he disputes some of the discourse around “Eddington.”

“I heard one person say it was harder on the left than the right, and I think that’s pretty disingenuous,” he says. “In the film, one side is kind of annoying and frustrating and hypocritical, and the other side is killing people and destroying lives.”

For Aster, satirizing the left doesn’t mean he doesn’t share their beliefs. “If there’s no self-reflection,” he says, “how are we ever going to get out of this?”

Capturing ‘what was in the air’

Aster began writing “Eddington” in June 2020. He set it in New Mexico, where his family moved when he was 10. Aster wanted to try to capture the disconnect that didn’t start with the pandemic but then reached a surreal crescendo. He styled “Eddington” as a Western with smartphones in place of guns — though there are definitely guns, too.

“The dread I was living with suddenly intensified. And to be honest, I’ve been living with that level of dread ever since,” Aster says. “I just wanted to see if I could capture what was in the air.”

Scripts that dive headlong into politics are far from regular in today’s corporate Hollywood. Most studios would be unlikely to distribute a film like “Eddington,” though A24, the indie powerhouse, has stood behind Aster even after 2023's $35 million-budgeted “Beau Is Afraid” struggled at the box office. A24 has shown a willingness to engage with political discord, backing last year’s speculative war drama, “Civil War.”

And Aster's screenplay resonated with Phoenix, who had starred in “Beau Is Afraid,” and with Pascal. In Cannes, Pascal noted that “it’s very scary to participate in a movie that speaks to issues like this.” For Phoenix, “Eddington” offered clarity and empathy for the pandemic experience.

“We were all terrified and we didn’t fully understand it. And instead of reaching out to each other in those moments, we kind of became antagonistic toward each other and self-righteous and certain of our position,” Phoenix earlier told The AP. “And in some ways it’s so obvious: Well, that’s not going to be helpful.”

‘A time of total obscenity’

Since Aster made “Eddington” — it was shot in 2024 — the second administration of President Donald Trump has ushered in a new political reality that Aster acknowledges would have reshaped his film.

“I would have made the movie more obscene,” he says. “And I would have made it angrier. I think the film is angry. But I think we’re living in a time of total obscenity, beyond anything I’ve seen.”

“Eddington” is designed to be argued over. Even those who find its first half well-observed may recoil at the violent absurdism of its second half. The movie, Aster says, pivots midway and, itself, becomes paranoid and gripped by differing world views. You can almost feel Aster struggling to bring any coherence to his, and our, modern-day Western.

But whatever you make of “Eddington,” you might grant it’s vitally important that we have more films like it — movies that don’t tiptoe around today in period-film metaphor or avoid it like the plague. Aster, at least, doesn’t sound finished with what he started.

“I’m feeling very heartbroken about where we are, and totally lost, so I’m looking for ways to go into those feelings but also to challenge them. What can be done?” Aster says. “Because this is a movie about people who are unreachable to each other and completely siloed off, or fortressed off, a question that kept coming to me was: What would an olive branch look like? How do we find a way to reengage with each other?”