Murder Mystery 2 (2023)

Murder Mystery 2 arrives as the second entry in a collection that exists chiefly to give Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston a working holiday in attractive locations. The Spitzes, now full-time private detectives, are summoned to the private island wedding of their friend the Maharajah Vikram, who is promptly kidnapped. The trail runs through the Arc de Triomphe, a countryside château, and the upper reaches of the Eiffel Tower. The supporting cast is genuinely international: Jodie Turner-Smith, John Kani, Mélanie Laurent, Dany Boon, Adeel Akhtar, Kuhoo Verma. A henna stain supplies the final clue. This is a globe-trotting whodunit populated by whoever the location scouts could plausibly assemble, and the film never stops to congratulate itself for it. The diversity is texture, not thesis.

Audrey Spitz functions as an equal partner in the investigation and delivers the deduction that cracks the case, which places the film a comfortable notch above the damsel convention without advancing any argument about it. Elsewhere the cupboard is bare. A billionaire is the victim, the ransom is scattered into the wind for a stunt, and wealth remains a plot device instead of a target. There is no identity material beyond the married couple at the center, no environmental concern, no body-positivity gesture, no neurodivergent character, and no history requiring revision.

Most striking is the near-total absence of instruction. The film wants to show us a man brawling atop the Eiffel Tower and a helicopter meeting its rotor blades, and it pursues those goals with a single-mindedness that borders on the admirable. Nobody lectures. Nobody learns a lesson about society. The picture is content to be genially mediocre, as the critical consensus had it, and there is a certain integrity in that.