Murder Mystery Netflix review: "Sandler and Aniston bring freewheeling energy to a caricatured caper"

Adam and Jen play the brash American couple who embark on a dream holiday to Europe, only to become caught up in a billion-dollar bloodbath

Published: Thursday, 20 June 2019 at 9:47 am

A star rating of 2 out of 5.

The classic husband-and-wife sleuth team was Nick and Nora Charles — popularised in the 1930s and 40s Thin Man film series by William Powell and Myrna Loy.

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Crime-cracking couples have flourished on TV since (Hart to Hart, McMillan & Wife, Castle), but this Netflix-funded revival is more like Manhattan Murder Mystery on the Med, with Adam Sandler as a promotion-shy New York cop and Jennifer Aniston as his crime-fiction-fan wife.

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In the creaking set-up of James Vanderbilt’s derivative screenplay, Aniston charms Luke Evans’s English viscount on a flight to Europe, and he invites her and Sandler to join him on his family’s superyacht.

There, we are introduced to a motley parade of inheritance-chasers (David Walliams, Gemma Arterton, Adeel Akhtar among them), who hope patriarch Terence Stamp croaks before signing away his billion-dollar fortune to his young wife.

The corpses mount up as our heroes fall under suspicion and learn to mend their marriage between predictable predicaments on a high ledge, under a conjugal bed, and behind the wheel on a Grand Prix circuit — all perfunctorily staged by TV director Kyle Newacheck.

Sandler and Aniston bring freewheeling energy to the caricatured caper, but ultimately fail to convince us this is franchise-worthy material.

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Murder Mystery is on Netflix

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Authors

Andrew Collins

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