Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Murder Mystery’ on Netflix, Adam Sandler’s Listless New Comedy

Adam Sandler’s longstanding Netflix movie deal ambles along with Murder Mystery, which reunites the comic actor with his Just Go With It co-star, Jennifer Aniston. It was preceded in critical death by The Ridiculous 6, The Do-Over, Sandy Wexler and The Week Of, four heavily watched movies that proved Netflix is the perfect platform for his phlegmatic comedies. Anyone worried that his recent acclaimed stand-up special, 100% Fresh, and work with hotshot filmmakers the Safdie Bros. signaled a deviation from his lackadaisical norm will watch this new film with one burning question on their minds: Are we witnessing the Sandleraissance?

MURDER MYSTERY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Because Netflix viewers are more likely to give up on a movie partway through than theatergoers, Murder Mystery jams one of the Happy Madison Productions signatures into the first few minutes: an avalanche of product placement. Gift cards to a major online retailer, two different name-brand OTC allergy medications, a name-brand puffed-cheese snack and a bowel-excoriating name-brand energy drink enjoy their screen time early, so be sure to look for these products stacked three leagues high smack in the middle of an aisle at a Wal-Mart near you.

With that out of the way, the movie gets on with fulfilling the promise of its boring, generic, forgettable title. Sandler plays Nick Spitz, a New York City cop who’s been fibbing to his wife, Audrey (Aniston), that he was promoted to detective, when he really failed the exam three times. She’s a sweetheart hairdresser with a love of pulpy murder-mystery novels. He’s a single-pocket-T-shirt schlub, and a cheapskate, and has a stupid mustache, and promised her 15 years ago that they’d go to Europe for their honeymoon, but never followed through on it. Other than that, he’s a catch.

Finally, he relents. On the flight to Spain, Audrey meets Charles Cavendish (Luke Evans), an English royal something something guy, who invites them for a cruise on his billionaire, billion-year-old uncle’s yacht. They’re joined by movie star Grace Ballard (Gemma Arterton); hip hop-lingo-spouting Maharajah Vikram Govindan (Adeel Akhtar); Formula One driver Juan Carlos Rivera (Luis Gerardo Mendez); the eyepatched Colonel Ulenga (John Kani) and his prosthetic hand; Charles’ cousin Tobias Quince (David Walliams); Russian man-mountain Sergei Leonov (Olafur Darri Olafsson); and Suzi Nakamura (Shioli Kutsuna), Charles’ ex, and now the old man’s gold-digging trophy wife-to-be.

The old man, Malcolm Quince, is played by Terence Stamp, a long, long way from Billy Budd — and Superman II, for that matter. An ancient Chinese dagger enjoys a cameo (can we get one at Wal Mart?), but then poof! The lights go out. Scuffling. Screaming. A shot rings out! The lights come back on, and Malcolm is dead, the ancient Chinese dagger plunged into his heart. And there stands Audrey, reader of countless murder mysteries, and Nick, wannabe detective, poised to Hercule Poirot this situation within an inch of its life.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Imagine Murder on the Orient Express, except it’s a murder-mystery dinner you Groupon’d for BOGO 50% off.

Performance Worth Watching: Among the film’s bevy of stereotypes and bland characters, Stamp, playing a stereotypical rich Caucasian miser, leaves his, you know, stamp, in just a couple minutes of screen time.

Memorable Dialogue: “You are all leeches. Repugnant. Bloodfat. Suckling on the tit of my good work for so many years. You repulse me,” Malcolm says, about to write everyone out of his will. There’s something about Terence Stamp being a cruel old bastard that really gets my cockles flaring.

Single Best Shot: Aniston and a polo shirt with Sandler in it climb out of a swank Rolls Royce.

Sex and Skin: Arterton and Akhtar dry-hump with their clothes on while Sandler and Aniston hide beneath the bed, stifling their giggles.

Our Take: There are more than nine minutes of end credits for this movie. NINE MINUTES. Why? It’s inexplicable. As for the previous 89 minutes, they contain approximately 2.4 laughs, a minimal-effort performance from Sandler, who enjoys a working vacation in Monte Carlo and other pretty locales, and once again plays a variation of the same barely likable, barely written snoozy-nincompoop character from so many of his movies.

But unlike Sandler’s more actively loathsome fare — That’s My Boy, Don’t Mess With the Zohan, Jack and Jill — Murder Mystery doesn’t inspire ire. It’s merely dull. A time-waster. A cardboard box full of packing peanuts and nothing else. A comedio-dramatic void as memorable as the 167th time you unconsciously exhaled carbon dioxide this morning. It features people saying things on your television screen, some music here and there, a light car chase and, again, a shocking nine-plus minutes (!!!) of end credits. This is where I’d normally describe instances of great and desperate tastelessness, a hallmark of many Sandler films, but there are none. The movie exists to play while you watch your wallpaper quietly hang on the drywall.

Aniston enjoys one of the movie’s bigger laughs: “He’s dead! Do we call housekeeping?” she says with the kind of crisp comic timing that’s an anomaly in this movie. Her career has been quiet lately. I’m sure she was paid reasonably well for this. Hopefully The Morning Show, which debuts later this year on Apple+, lives up to its potential. Bottom line: NO SANDLERASSAINCE.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Then again, maybe we should be thankful Sandler made this instead of Grown Ups 3.