Review of Murder Mystery (2019)
Seen in 2023.
A lower-class US couple go on their European honeymoon, 15 years late and up to their eyeballs in upper-class murder.
There’s an interesting detail here: The central couple, the Spitzes, are played by popular actors Aniston and Sandler, who are wealthy. Sandler alone owned about $400 million at the time. It is a central comedic conceit that this couple commits a series of faux pas associated with the lower class, including stealing on multiple occasions. The interesting detail is that they twice approach a bus populated entirely by even more negative stereotypes of the working class, who are less funny. The Spitzes are the fake poor, played by the rich and aligned with the viewer against the real poor represented by the bus. This symbolism is combined with a traditional satire of the rich, played by less-rich actors as a hateful, entitled and incompetent elite. The Spitzes thus occupy a middle ground or middle class of sympathy: Themselves comically flawed, they are surrounded on both sides by more negative sterotypes.
References here: Knives Out (2019).