Murder Mystery

Adam Sandler movies haven’t been of the highest quality lately.  Sandler himself has admitted, to an extent, that many of his recent films are an excuse to take his friends on a vacation somewhere awesome and have it paid for by the studios.  That being said, while Murder Mystery is set in an idyllic location, southern France and Italy, the usual suspects of Sandler vacation movies, such as Kevin James and Rob Schneider, weren’t involved, which gave me some hope this movie could be good.  That hope was misplaced.

The premise of the film is solid; I can imagine the pitch meeting.  A long suffering patrolman who dreams of being a detective and his mystery novel loving wife become the prime suspects in an Agatha Christie type murder while on vacation and must solve the crime to clear their names.  Not only does this offer plenty of potential for fish out of water comedy situations but it also provides the perfect framework on which to hang tons of pointed satire of the murder mystery genre. Weirdly, the film decides to ignore both of these directions.  It is neither an interesting send up of murder mystery cliches nor a particularly funny film that covers its lack of structural wit with a bevvy of belly laughs.

Murder Mystery has a ton of issues with pacing.  In particular, it futzes about for too long before getting to the actual murder.  Much of the early runtime is dedicated to establishing the main couple and their relationship, but rather than offering tight exposition it creates moments for delivering jokes that don’t land and bickering that is less The Thin Man and more American Beauty.  Eventually they get on the plane and the movie can finally trip awkwardly through the contrivance that will put them at the scene of the crime: a massive yacht owned by one of the world’s richest men. I had hoped that the ludicrous justification for them being on the boat would actually pay off in a third act reveal, but sadly that never happened.

In classic locked door mystery fashion, the murder happens while the yacht is underway, providing a remote location with a limited number of big personalities as suspects: the Raj, the actress, the race car driver, the disappointing son, etc.  Rather than put the murder up front, to get the plot moving, and have these characters reveal more and more about themselves as the investigation goes on, Murder Mystery drags us through scene after scene of unfunny gags where our central couple is introduced to each future suspect.  This takes something that should be fun, learning about the characters and how their backstories give them motivation to commit the crime, and turns it into nothing more than clunky exposition. Again, it is possible it was done this way to make a series of vignettes in which to pack in jokes, but since I wasn’t laughing it just got in the way of moving the story forward.

Finally, after what was probably a third of the run time, we get the (I imagine purposely) cliche arrival of the rich old father figure, his dramatic speech concerning his will that shocks all those in attendance, and his subsequent murder.  Here the movie picks up some, going from unbelievably bad to simply mediocre.

Once the solving of the mystery begins, there is less time for the jokes that aren’t working and what time they do make for humor comes in the form of situations, rather than verbal sparring, which I think suits the story much better.  It can be a bit broad for my tastes, such as the scene where all the bookshelves in a library fall down like dominoes, but at least the gag is part of action that is finally moving the plot forward. My biggest complaint with this part of the movie is the way that it keeps upping the stakes by killing off characters.  A mystery story is good when there are a bunch of different suspects and you, as the audience, are going through the mental exercise of using the clues the story gives you to figure out who-done-it along with the protagonist(s). By killing off suspects, Murder Mystery eliminates too many of the possible murderers through death rather than deductive reasoning, which isn’t very fun.

The ending is a mixed bag.  On the one hand, I enjoyed that it kept me on my toes.  I suspected from early on that the butler would do it, thanks to some particularly unsubtle foreshadowing, but the way in which they have the butler do it was actually a nice twist.  On the other hand, if the movie is trying to imitate the structure of a murder mystery, then the twist is done in a way that the audience could never have figured it out, which might be considered poor form.  The movie also doesn’t have the backbone to finish on something as small as a classic reveal, so it tacks on a totally pointless action sequence with a car chase in a cynically move to please the masses.

There is a trend with modern comedies to write an outline of the script, hire funny people, and then have them ad lib a million takes until you hit comedy gold.  This puts the onus on the editor, rather than the writer or director, to really put a funny piece together. It can be done successfully, like in the hang out comedies of Judd Apatow, but often fails when the subject matter demands more of the script, such as world building or intricate plots, as in the Ghostbusters reboot or Holmes & Watson.  While this film might have been a brilliant little picture in the hands of a genre satire master like Edgar Wright, what we get instead is a gutless vehicle for low effort ad lib comedy that is never funny enough to make you overlook all the wasted potential. It’s not offensively stupid like Grown Ups, nor is it unwatchably boring like Blended, but it is a far cry from The Wedding Singer or The Waterboy, or especially Punch Drunk Love, in terms of humor, heart, and quality storytelling.

Would Recommend: If you like Adam Sandler comedies, even the newer ones.

Would Not Recommend: If you love tight genre comedies a la Edgar Wright.