A relaxing holiday on a sunny beach where you can curl up with a good mystery book and finding out the butler did it once again sounds ever so thrilling, doesn’t it? Mysteries are all fun and games until you’re in one. Enter Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston, who after eight years in 2011’s Just Go With it, join forces again in the 2019 Netflix Comedy Murder Mystery, as an average couple who practically enter a real-life game of Cluedo. A classic ‘who dunnit’ on a Mediterranean yacht surely was entertaining for a bored girl like myself, whose biggest mystery in our house is who forgot to open the bathroom window for fresh air. Spoiler alert, it’s always my dad.
Mysteries always wish to end with a big shocker. Sherlock Holmes, The Hardy Boys, …Scooby Doo. But what Kyle Newacheck’s Murder Mystery does so well and differently is it ticks both boxes of a hysterical comedy slash mystery in one epic film that we didn’t know we needed to get our Friday movie night sorted.
The film starts off with Nick Spitz (Adam Sandler) a New York police officer, and his wife, Audrey Spitz (Jennifer Aniston), who works as hairdresser. Both get on with their mediocre, mundane life while Audrey still patiently waits for her husband to take her to Europe as he promised. After 15 years of marriage, a struggling Nick who has failed his detective test numerous times, asks his wife to finally pack their bags to fly on a plane to Europe, which he secretly can't afford. Meanwhile on the plane, Audrey bumps into the charming, billionaire, Charles Cavendish, who invites the couple to join him on their family yacht to celebrate his elderly uncle, Malcom Quince’s engagement to Charles’s former fiancé. Nick and Audrey refuse to miss out on their once in a lifetime chance to holiday on a fancy yacht and agree to join (despite how suspicious the offer seemed). At the party, they meet Charles’s ex-fiance, Suzi Nakamura (Shioli Kutsana), his cousin Tobey Quince (David Walliams), actress Grace Ballard (Gemma Arteton), race car driver Juan Carlos Rivera (Luis Gerardo Mendez), Maharajah Vikram Govindan (Adeel Akhtar), Colonel Charles Ulenga (John Kani) and his bodyguard Sergei Radienko, (Olafur Darri Olafsson). All seems well until both Audrey and Nick end up being present at the crime scene, when Malcom Quince is murdered at his own party and everyone there, including the Spitzes were left being suspects. Desperate to get out of this situation, the couple team up to figure out who the culprit is.
Murder Mystery takes us on a zigzag of unexpected twist and turns as we go from one accused character to another in a matter of minutes. Granted this isn’t a complex mystery and consists of the traditional and predictable ‘suspects’ we all know, but the hilarious jokes added is what makes the movie what it is. A mockery of traditional detective films which makes you crackle out loud. Aniston and Sandler’s chemistry sparkles throughout the whole film as we get to see both reach their full potential while solving the case while having a summer they won’t forget. I particularly like the idea of a couple with the most boring lives ending up in an adventure we could all dream of. I mean who doesn’t want to play a real-life Cluedo on an exotic holiday to Europe?
