Murder Mystery 2

Film critic Peter Travers shares his review of "Murder Mystery 2," which arrives on Netflix Friday.

"Murder Mystery 2" stays stuck in the cobwebs and takes Sandler and Aniston with it. The rest of us are stuck with a script that is no fun at all. If you saw Sandler in "Uncut Gems" and Aniston in "The Morning Show," you know each can generate comic and dramatic fireworks. In "Murder Mystery 2," Nick and Audrey are now full time sleuths who've opened up their own detective agency that's struggling for clients. In case you can't remember the first "Murder Mystery," and there's no reason you should, Sandler plays Nick Spitz, a New York cop without the brains to pass a detective test. When they luck into a European yacht vacation, they accidentally solve a series of murders.

Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston return as private detectives in this Netflix follow-up comedy.

There’s a bit more scale to this sequel, and plenty of flat gags that will have just a tad more vigor if you’re familiar with the recurring characters. They are soon whisked away to the destination wedding of a friend, the Maharajah (Adeel Akhtar), a familiar face from the first movie. With “Murder Mystery 2,” the sequel to the 2019 comedy

The Sandler and Aniston chemistry rules in a movie whose cut-rate streaming aesthetic is inseparable from its charm.

The new movie has a different director, Jeremy Garelick (with a script once again by James Vanderbilt), but for the most part he’s smart enough not to get in the way of the fractious agreeability of the Sandler-and-Aniston bickering. They land on a tropical island that makes paradise look shabby, though Nick is as focused on the succulent wedge of artisanal cheese left in their bedroom as a welcome gift as he is on the setting. But you could also say, in an age when your average theatrical hit is suffused with FX sensation, often at the expense of the humanity that has drawn people to movies for most of the last century, that the stripped-down, Look, I’m a piece of product! So will “Murder Mystery 2.” It’s only 89 minutes long (10 minutes shorter than the first film), and for a while it feels like an even more trivial Wiffle-ball entertainment. It was also a “Knives Out” mystery done on what felt like one-tenth the budget, with the suspects all cartoons out of central casting. The two wound up on a yacht, at the party for a geezer aristocrat, which turned out to be his death sentence the moment he cut everyone there out of his will.