‘Murder Mystery 2’: the Adam Sandler movie that set a world record
Few actors vary in quality quite as wildly as Adam Sandler. For every Happy Gillmore, there’s a Pixels. For every Uncut Gems, there’s a Jack and Jill. It’s part of the modern Sandler discourse that his form is all over the place, but as long as people keep watching his movies, studios will continue to pour obscene amounts of money into them.
Landing somewhere in the middle of the star’s filmography are the two Murder Mystery movies. He and Jennifer Aniston play Nick and Audrey Spitz, a married couple who end up embroiled in a series of crimes by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the first movie, they encounter a seedy aristocrat played by Luke Evans, while the sequel is a globetrotting adventure that kicks off with an elaborate wedding.
One of the key scenes in Murder Mystery 2, for which Jeremy Garelick took over directing duties from Kyle Newacheck, takes place in the Le Jules Verne restaurant, located on the second floor of the Eiffel Tower. While some of the iconic Parisian landmarks were recreated in a studio, some filming took place on the monument itself. As Garelick told Metro, this doesn’t happen very often.
He talked about how very few movies get to film on the actual tower itself, let alone do stunts involving it. “We had an incredible stunt team,” he said. “Kelly Phelan was the first female to jump off of the Eiffel Tower; she’s now in the Guinness Book of World Records. It was the first time a stunt was allowed to be shot on the Eiffel Tower for a film.” The stunt in question is when Audrey gets thrown off the structure and ends up dangling off the side of it. While Aniston was involved in the studio shoots, Phelan, whose other credits include Happy Death Day, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, and Army of the Dead, worked on location.
The Eiffel Tower has appeared in countless movies over the years, but only a handful of productions have been granted the honour of using it for filming. The James Bond movie A View to a Kill features a memorable fight scene up and down the Tower, including Grace Jones’ character parachuting off the top of it. The 1965 comedy The Great Race ends with Jack Lemmon’s character accidentally destroying the Tower, but needless to say, that wasn’t the real thing.
“We also recreated the top three levels of the Eiffel Tower [thanks to] Perry Blake, our incredible production designer,” Garelick elaborated. “We built that on stage, and we had incredible visual effects—so it was a combination.’ He also revealed that Sandler, Aniston, and the rest of the cast were keen to be very involved in the physical aspects of the film. “They liked kicking ass,” he said. “But our producers would stop them and be like, ‘You know what, let’s let Kelly do this.’ But they did get to do a lot of their own stunts.”
Murder Mystery 2 is a very average film, but there’s no denying that the set pieces are impressive. At a time when stunt performers are receiving renewed attention with talk of the long-awaited ‘Best Stunts’ Oscar, it’s important to acknowledge the impressive work these guys do. Even if the films themselves aren’t great.
