Metacritic reviews

Sandler and Aniston mesh; they made you believe in Nick and Audrey’s cantankerous marriage, and in the love percolating just beneath the fighting. If what Nora Ephron devised was a clever Xerox of the rom-com, “Murder Mystery 2” is a Xerox of the Xerox, powered by a whodunit plot that’s a cheesy light parody of itself played just straight enough to work.

The saving grace of Murder Mystery 2 is that Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler have a renewed sense of charm, bouncing agreeably off each other as a married couple struggling to revive the unique magic they found in their first adventure.

No one involved in Murder Mystery 2 seems to have worked with any real sense of direction, since the film is more than happy to let Sandler and Aniston take the steering wheel. There’s an easy chemistry to the pair.

As they have in past team-ups, Sandler and Aniston maintain a charming midcareer looseness, and have a palpable affability as a duo — one can sense the fun they had making such silliness, even if the result isn’t gold.

It’s made just-about-watchable by Sandler and Aniston again, whose combined movie star charm proves magnetic enough to carry us through the flatter moments, both nailing some effectively chaotic physical comedy and maintaining a warm, relaxed chemistry.

Ultimately Murder Mystery 2 is the most business-as-usual kind of Sandler shtick, its only real surprise being how the production manages to pull off one solitary, very lonely surprise toward its end (it involves a quick appearance from Jillian Bell, bless her heart).

Murder Mystery 2 is the perfect background noise that Netflix has built an empire out of.

The only real amusement comes from the casual asides delivered by Sandler and Aniston, the latter also providing perfectly calibrated slow-burn reactions that too often become overshadowed by the overproduced mayhem surrounding them.

The near-four-year gap between movies does help in one respect, allowing people to largely forget what left them unimpressed about the original.

Dismally lazy nonsense whose only redeeming element is that its credits roll a good 10 minutes before the conclusion of its stated runtime.