Adam Sandler’s Netflix comedies are slowly getting better

polygon.com:

Viewers tuning into Netflix on March 31 for Murder Mystery 2, starring Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston, can reasonably expect certain things, since the movie is one of Sandler’s many Happy Madison productions for the streaming service. Obviously, Sandler once again plays a just-plain-folks type who accidentally winds up in the lap of luxury. Of course the ensemble includes thinly drawn supporting characters who exist primarily so Sandler and his latest on-screen wife can take cheap shots at their transparently bad (or just odd) behavior. As usual, the plotting has a ramshackle quality, possibly imposed by Sandler and his Happy Madison staffers.

To these routines, Murder Mystery 2 adds further sequel-related certainties: Once again, Nick Spitz (Sandler) and his wife, Audrey (Aniston), bicker and solve a crime while on vacation. (Though if you assume the central crime will be an actual murder mystery, you have either not given Happy Madison enough credit, or given it far too much.) Anyone who saw 2019’s Murder Mystery will know what they’re getting into. The one surprise: At this point, the baseline for Sandler’s routine comedies has been moved up several notches.

Sandler’s relationship with Netflix didn’t start out this way. Hopes that he might use his long-term deal with the streamer to get out of his 2010s-era rut were dashed when his 2015 movie The Ridiculous 6, a longtime dream-project Western, was just as slipshod and crudely conceived as the likes of 2013’s big-studio release Grown Ups 2. His follow-up, the 2016 Netflix movie The Do-Over — a weirdly violent buddy comedy with David Spade — mostly felt like a listless exercise in both men really missing their late pal Chris Farley.

But a few years into his first