Nick and Audrey are a middle-aged couple with middle-age couple problems. She's a hairdresser who spends her time gossiping at the salon and reading murder mystery novels, while he's a cop who can't get the passed the detective's exam. But rather than telling Audrey about this, he just decides to lie about it and parade around as a "detective". His lies and secrets escalate to a spontaneous holiday as a fifteen-year late honeymoon. On the plane, Audrey meets a handsome and wealthy man in first class who invites them both on his boat for a family gathering. But when a murder occurs on the boat, Nick and Audrey find themselves as the prime suspects as they attempt to unravel the mystery themselves.

The story is pure fluff and entertainment. It's not even remotely serious, high-brow, or particularly challenging to predict. It has its surprises as it goes along, jumping over all sorts of red herrings, and yet the big reveal ends up less of a revelation and more of a confirmation. There's no real depth of characters here either. Every single character, Nick and Audrey included, are just cardboard cut-outs made from sentence-long stingers. Nick is a lying yet loving husband, Audrey is having a little too much fun, Cavendish is charmingly handsome, Grace is vapid and narcissistic, De La Croix is single-minded, Maharajah is a wannabe cool guy, Ulenga is a grizzled war veteran, Sergei is a silent and imposing bodyguard, Suzi is a gold-digger, and Juan Carlos is...not English speaking? Is that really a character trait? Anyway, each character is just as shallow as they need to be to fit conveniently into one of Audrey's pulpy books, and that's all there is to it.

Humour is extremely hit and miss. I did burst out with laughter on a couple of occasions, so I guess it was worth it in that regard, but most of the jokes just failed to land entirely thanks to awkward delivery and deliberately bad overacting. The film is definitely at its highest when playing Sandler and Aniston off one another, either for humour gains, or just seeing them as a super adorable couple oozing with chemistry. In almost every scene they're holding hands or being cute together, and that's just a nice thing to see in non-romance movies these days. Too often writers feel like couple have to go through some big turmoil in order to have dramatic weight, and while Nick's lies are certainly a wall between them, it never overrides the plot and gets in the way of what a nice match they are together.

Murder Mystery is a not a great movie by any means, but it's just about vanilla enough to be a half-decent way to waste an hour and a half. I certainly don't regret watching this movie, but it's not one I'm likely to ever rewatch. It takes no risks at all, not in its humour, its characters, or its story, which makes it an easy and inoffensive, yet unfulfilling watch. I give it a not bad 6/10.