Holmes & Watson

Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment

Apr 08, 2019 Web Exclusive By Austin Trunick

What did we expect? Holmes & Watson was one of the worst-reviewed movies of 2018. This is a film that had tested so poorly its studio pushed its release date back four months while they tried to dump it off to Netflix, who respectfully declined. It came in a dismal seventh place in its Christmas release window, and earned a scathing 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The movie’s only notable achievement was that it took home four Razzie awards, including Worst Picture and Worst Director.

But, a movie reuniting Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly must have some redeeming qualities, right? You should theoretically just be able to stick those guys in a room together and leave a camera rolling and come away with something reasonably hilarious, right?

Oh, gosh. We were wrong. We were so, so wrong.

Holmes & Watson is an example of film comedy at its laziest and most lifeless. Ferrell stars as consulting detective Sherlock Holmes, and the joke here is that he’s actually very dumb. Reilly plays his partner, Dr. Watson, who is marginally less dumb, but also so hopelessly devoted to his famous colleague that he believes he’s a genius. After Holmes witlessly releases the murderous Professor Moriarty (Ralph Fiennes) from incarceration, the Queen of England receives a letter from Holmes’ sworn nemesis threatening to assassinate Her Majesty in four days unless the detective solves his dastardly series of riddles.

Ferrell and Reilly have played idiots before – quite masterfully – in both Step Brothers and Talladega Nights. You could say it’s what they’re known for. Both of those movies, while far-fetched and as ridiculous as they come, still showed a lot of heart; Holmes & Watson, on the other hand, operates on nothing more than the premise that these two are stone cold dumb-dumbs. (It’s fitting that those two prior movies were directed by Adam McKay, whose Oscar-nominated Vice opened just ahead of Holmes & Watson at the box office.) Their idiocy even spoils the slipshod mystery that serves as the movie’s plot: they don’t solve any crimes so much as accidentally stumble onto solutions. The period setting only serves to set up a bunch of soon-to-be-dated gags, from Ferrell donning a red “Make England Great Again” ballcap to a painfully long scene built around a mishap with a selfie stick. An extended parody of the 1990 film Ghost crops up at one point, a quarter-century past when it could still conceivably feel relevant; it leaves younger viewers scratching their heads in confusion, and older viewers cringing. The only laughs came in the movie’s opening flashback to the characters’ childhood, and that’s probably because it’s hard to screw up kids saying nasty things to each other. It’s hard to find words for how painful the movie becomes once the focus shifts to Ferrell and Reilly, but the phrase “unholy garbage” keeps popping to mind.

If you must watch Holmes & Watson – if, like us, you’re fooled into it hoping to recapture the magic of its stars’ comedies of the aughties – then home video at least includes a few extra features that might ease the pain you’ll feel afterward. There’s a Line-O-Rama feature which presents alternate takes in rapid-fire succession; Ferrell and Reilly’s improvisations are natural funnier than the movie’s awful script. There’s also a behind-the-scenes feature in which the stars openly discuss their admiration for each other, which will only make you wish you’d revisited Step Brothers instead.

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