Just a few months after the Netflix original Isn’t It Romantic comes another film that plays around with the tropes of a genre — this time, it is murder mysteries. And guess what? This one is actually fun! For months now, Netflix seems to have been pushing quantity over quality. But Murder Mystery seems to be one that works quite well.
Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler play a married couple — Audrey and Nick Spitz about to celebrate their 15th wedding anniversary. She's a hairdresser and he’s a NYPD cop, who has failed the detective exam for the third time (not totally incompetent though as one scene lets us know).
Audrey, who we learn is a fan of murder mysteries, has been waiting for her long-promised trip to Europe since her wedding day and once her wish comes true, that’s when the fun begins.
As in the grand tradition of murder mysteries, all the characters are stuck in one location. In this case, the country house is replaced by a yacht, the Mediterranean Queen, where the Spitzes are invited to stay by the dashing Charles Cavendish (Luke Evans).
The other characters (many of them British, of course), seem to leap out of the pages of an Agatha Christie novel.
- Cast: Jennifer Aniston, Adam Sandler, Luke Evans, Gemma Arterton, David Walliams
- Director: Kyle Newacheck
- Run time: 1 hour 37 minutes
- Storyline: A New York cop and his hairdresser wife get caught up in a murder mystery while on vacation in Europe
There is the billionaire Malcolm Quince who is married to Charles’s 23-year-old ex-fiancee Suzi, star of the silver screen Grace Ballard (Gemma Arterton), Tobias Quince (David Walliams), Colonel Ulenga (John Kani) and his bodyguard Sergei, Formula One driver Juan Carlos (Luis Gerardo Mendez), and rather strangely, a Mumbai Maharaja who talks like Ali G, played by Adeel Akhtar.
The group has assembled on Malcolm’s invitation where he informs them that they have all been cut out of his will. Once the murder is committed, it’s up to the Spitzes to figure out who did it as the body count steadily rises.
Aniston and Sandler have an easy chemistry and a familiarity with each other and of course, there is a lot of humour. The rest of the cast is uniformly good (special mention for Gemma Arterton and David Walliams) and we cannot forget our official detective Inspector Laurent Delacroix (French, not Belgian), who enters the proceedings later.
Everyone seems to have a motive (they all agree though that the one thing out of the ordinary is the Americans). Chases ensue, red herrings pop up, and of course, we get the classic assembling of the group to reveal the murderer.
The film ends with a big wink at the audience as the Spitzes continue their trip in Europe in what else — a very special train.