Murder Mystery 2 sees Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler hone chemistry

In Murder Mystery 2 Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler peddle borderline dad jokes. It’s a Friday night movie; one to watch with a glass of something and the brain in sleep mode.

Jennifer Aniston as Audrey Spitz and Adam Sandler as Nick Spitz in Murder Mystery 2. Cr. Scott Yamano/Netflix © 2022.

Murder Mystery 2 (M)
Netflix
★★★

The comedy-thriller Murder Mystery 2 joins the long line of movies that might be described as Agatha Christie Lite. There’s a murder, with the likelihood of more to come, a detective and a room full of suspects.

As the title suggests, this is a sequel to Murder Mystery (2019), in which New York cop Nick Spitz (Adam Sandler) and his hairdresser wife Audrey (Jennifer Aniston) become involved in a murder case in Monte Carlo.

The scriptwriter, James Vanderbilt, who wrote the serious 2007 crime movie Zodiac, returns, as do most of the cast, but there’s a new director in Jeremy Garelick, who wrote the 2009 comedy The Hangover.

It’s four years later and Nick and Audrey, having quit their jobs, are struggling to make it as private detectives. It’s having a detrimental effect on their 16-year marriage.

When their mega-rich friend Maharajah Vik (Adeel Akhtar) invites them to a private island for his wedding, they jump (in a helicopter) at the chance.

Landing on the estate, they see flamingoes clad in nappies so they don’t spoil the lawn. When the Maharajah arrives, on an elephant, for the pre-nuptial celebrations, he has a cheese knife in his back.

Two spoiler alerts: first, the obvious suspects, the flamingoes, are innocent; second, it’s not the Maharajah but his bodyguard. The groom has been kidnapped and the villains demand $US50m for his return.

It’s an inside job, which narrows the list of suspects to the French bride-to-be (Melanie Laurent), the under-appreciated younger sister (Kuhoo Verma), the former fiancee (Jodie Turner-Smith), the one-armed colonel (John Kani) and the sleazebag former soccer star (Enrique Arce).

It’s up to Nick and Audrey to crack whodunnit and save their friend. That means, as Nick puts it, “We’re next on the kill list.”

That’s the set up for this 89-minute light entertainment. Its strengths are the comic chemistry between Sandler and Aniston and the addition of Mark Strong as a MI5 agent assigned to the case.

When he emerges, James Bond-like, from the ocean, gleaming bald and lean, Audrey looks on for a bit too long. Nick makes a joke about how Rogaine doesn’t work for everyone.

That sort of sums up the humour: borderline dad jokes. The armless colonel, the Spitzs confused for Shitzs and so on. It’s a Friday night movie; one to watch with a glass of something and the brain in sleep mode.

There are some similarities to The Thin Man from 1934, based on the novel by Dashiell Hammett and starring William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles. However when it comes to dialogue, that near-90-year-old movie leaves this one for dead.

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Tetris (M)
Apple TV+
★★★½
The drawn-from-life drama Tetris is a bit like the video game it’s named after: slow to start but, once it warms up, a bit addictive.

Set in the late 1980s when Mikhail Gorbachev was running the Soviet Union, its real-life characters fit well into a Cold War espionage caper.

There’s Alexey Pajitnov (Nikita Yefremov), the Soviet computer programmer who invents Tetris in his downtime, and Robert Stein (Toby Jones), the Hungarian-born English entrepreneur who discovers the game. (His grand­daughter has criticised the film for suggesting he stole it).

The main character is Henk Rogers (Taron Egerton), the Dutch-born, New York-raised, Tokyo-based software developer who makes clandestine trips to Moscow to try to buy the licensing rights on behalf of Nintendo.

Actors Taron Egerton, Sofia Lebedeva and Nikita Yefremov in Tetris

In the background, and later the foreground, is Czech-born English media baron Robert Maxwell (an imposing Roger Allam) and his oily son Kevin (Anthony Boyle), who plan to acquire the rights for free, as the “stupid communists” don’t care about money.

There’s a droll moment, given what we know about Maxwell, when his son asks about some money missing from the Mirror Group’s pension fund. It’s just a “small accounting quirk”, Maxwell Snr says.

There’s a beautiful freelance translator, Sasha (Sofia Lebedeva), who guides Henk through the Soviet bureaucracy and who may be more than a translator. And there are the leather-jacketed hard men from the Politburo who think it’s time to look after themselves before Gorbachev (Matthew Marsh) ruins the joint.

This 118-minute movie is directed by Scottish filmmaker Jon S. Baird (Filth, Stan & Ollie) and written by Canadian screenwriter Noah Pink. The cold, grey streets of Moscow, full of food queues, a place were foreigners are treated with suspicion, were filmed in the director’s homeland. The up-front story is Henk, who has four young children, risking all he owns to try to make millions by bringing the “magical synchronicity” of Tetris to the western world.

“If you go we can’t protect you,’’ advises Nintendo America boss Howard Lincoln (Ben Miles).

For Alexey, who has two young sons, the dangers are even greater. Early on, he is visited by Politburo official Valentin Trifonov (Igor Grabuzov). “I just wanted to meet the man,’’ Trifonov says with a cold smile, “almost responsible for ­destroying the Soviet Union.”

What unfolds comes close to a James Bond thriller. The director has spiced up what happened in real life, as directors are wont to do.

I admire Egerton (Kingsman, Rocketman) as an actor but he feels a bit miscast here, as does Jones as Stein. The strong performances come from the supporting characters, particularly Maxwell and son, whose relationship could be drawn from the hit TV series Succession. The scene where they jet to Moscow to meet Gorbachev, who Maxwell Snr considers an “old friend”, is worth waiting for.

The back story is the final days of the Iron Curtain, and this is where the film is at its most interesting and timely, with Vladimir Putin’s Russia now in a hot war in Europe.

“Sometimes,’’ Henk tells the nervous Alexey, “you’ve got to say f--k the rules, right?”

Soon after, the translator offers Henk some advice. “The men in power think it’s a slippery slope from selling one game to selling all of Russia to the highest bidder.”