I have spent, perhaps, too much time thinking about Adam Sandler movies.
The original Murder Mystery was one of those light surprises you find sometimes in the world of streaming cinema. Jennifer Anniston and Sandler had interesting married couple energy and the jokes mostly landed.
I didn’t exactly rush to my tv to see the sequel but I had some time to kill over a weekend and I flipped it on.
I did in fact finish it but lost interest pretty early. And that led me to think about Sandler’s career.
So we should start with a Jimmy Kimmel clip where Sandler says that he sometimes makes movies by setting them in places that he wants to go on vacation. I can’t find that clip now (I suspect it’s been scrubbed because he gave the game away).
Murder Mystery and it’s sequel have that lazy, eh I want to get paid to go on vacation feeling.
The premise is an American couple — Sandler’s a cop, Anniston is a hair dresser — who get caught up with European royalty and accused of murder.
There is an elaborate dance number in Murder Mystery 2 and every person in the cast does the moves perfectly … except for Sandler and Anniston. This is explained away as dumb Americans who missed the directions in the room (or something, I’m hazy on it). But it’s just as likely that Sandler and Anniston said “learn an elaborate dance for this movie? Nah, I’m going back out for shenanigans in Europe.”
I mean I don’t know anything about movie making, I’m sure that’s not true, but yeesh.
Another moment that caught my eye was that they made some poor VFX artist turn smoke rings into CGI images of coitus. Kinda a funny. But also made me think, ‘of all the things you could have spent money on you chose this?’
I think it’s clear that I didn’t much care for Murder Myster 2. But man, do I think Adam Sandler earned the right to make this particular kind of thing if he wants to.
If you go all the way back to the 1990s Adam Sandler and a core group of friends because hot on Saturday Night Live.
He’s popular. He’s inventive. He’s the funniest person in the show. And then he gets fired.
Sandler then strings together a decade or so of hit movies and becomes one of the biggest comedy stars of all time.
He basically owned a decade from Billy Madison in 1995 until 2004. Sandler’s movies definetly had a formula but the secret of longevity in Hollywood is giving the audience what it wants.
Tom Cruise owned the 80s by making the same movie a half dozen times. And, Tarantino knew when he cast John Travolta in Pulp Fiction that people would really want to see him dance.
But even early on, Sandler was willing to take chances. Anger Management and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love looked at the darker side of Sandler’s angry man child persona.
In 2014 Sandler signed a $250 million deal with Netflix to make 6 movies. The deal has been extended since then and he’s made … more Adam Sandler movies.
Looking back this may have been one of the shrewdest moves by a movie star in that entire decade. What happens to just about every star? People stop going to the theater to see them.
The headlines about box office bombs crush them. And either they climb their way back to the top or they move into TV.
Sandler dodged that part of his career and kept making what he wanted to make.
Brilliant!
You need to check out Sandler’s triumphant return to Saturday Night Live. He performs two songs, one a hilarious tune about how he got fired from the show. And the other a touching tribute to his friend Chris Farley who was on his way to having an all time comedy career when he died.
As he’s singing about Farley you can see how much he’s still broken up, even now.
So here’s a guy, you can imagine, who was changed by a number of things, getting fired, losing his friend, and the weirdness that comes with being the biggest movie star in the world.
And he, retreats? Plays it safe? Makes broad comedies with his comedy pals and keeps them successful.
If I could count Chris Rock, David Spade and Kevin James as my friends I would probably cast them in as many movies as I could too.
Meanwhile, Sandler also occasionally makes himself available for something as astonishingly great as Uncut Gems. That movie was a heart attack but it was also amazing.
There’s a tendency to yell at movie stars, “Just make great movies!”
As if they aren’t trying to make great movies most of the time.
Maybe that was just the best they got offered that year? Or maybe they thought that’s what their audience wanted. Or thats what Netflix wanted for its $250 mil.
Maybe they just wanted to film a movie in Africa and they got offered Beast?
I mean would you turn that down?
Even my little note at the top of this piece about Sandler picking wild vacation spots to film his movies. Even that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be a bad movie.
The first time he did it the movie was set in Hawaii. Great vacation spot. And also home to one of the best Sandler films of all time: Fifty First Dates.
Dark Highways 
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