It's best if I say right up front that Murder Mystery is not a good movie. This is not Adam Sandler rediscovering his mojo, he still gives an underwhelming performance, and he often seems bored. However, there's a cast of goofy characters, played by actors who all seem to be swinging for the fences with their ridiculous performances. It is over-the-top and actually managed to make me laugh a few times. Admittedly, the opening of the film (where they establish our main characters) is a cliché-ridden mess that didn't fill me with much hope. But when they got on the boat, and met all the suspects, things started to click. I was kind of hoping that Sandler's character would prove to be a surprisingly good detective, but making him a bit incompetent improved Jennifer Aniston's role, so their decision was probably for the best.

The main reason that I didn't walk away from Murder Mystery annoyed or furious is that I'm a sucker for the genre. That's what made this movie most watchable for me. The title tells me all I need to know, and the film delivers a halfway decent puzzle for us to solve. The silly twists and turns in the plot kept me guessing, and made it so I was never bored. I feel like, if this was the old days when Sandler really seemed to care about the movies he was making, he could have made this great. I'm just so tired of him sleepwalking through films as if he does not even register fear, surprise, excitement, or any other emotion. Despite his performance, I found this to be a moderately entertaining film that lived up to the name Murder Mystery. It's not one I'll be re-watching, and I expect my opinion on it to worsen over the years. But it did enough to give me a hesitantly positive opinion for now.