HOLMES & WATSON: An Idiotic, Cynical Mess

The start of Holmes & Watson is both cynical and inexplicable. Dr. Watson (John C. Reilly), apparently fed up of his life, is about to launch himself from the roof of Sherlock Holmes’s flat building onto his prized plant, which Holmes (Will Ferrell) doesn’t want him to. “Fall over there!” he says, because a human life is less important than a plant’s, according to the film. Cynical, because of that. Inexplicable, because the two for some reason become friends right after.

Holes and Watson

The basic premise of the film is this: Moriarty (Ralph Fiennes) has apparently fled to America to avoid arrest, and used a lookalike to take the fall. Lestrade (Rob Bydon) doesn’t believe him, but Holmes runs with the theory regardless. Meanwhile, people are still being murdered, and the question that keeps being asked is, “if the criminal who can outsmart Holmes isn’t Moriarty,then who is it?”. It all culminates into some half-baked mystery about someone wanting to kill the Queen of England (Pam Ferris).

Holmes & Watson’s main downfall is that it doesn’t make sense on any account. If Moriarty is clever enough to avoid being captured by Sherlock Holmes, why would he have fled to America to begin with? Why does he send a dead body in a cake to Buckingham Palace? To send a message? Surely, if you’re going to commit such a high-profile murder you wouldn’t want anyone to know you were planning it, even if you were Moriarty.

Technically Speaking

The fallacies don’t end there. Writer/director Etan Cohen couldn’t have understood what film he was making, because conceptually Holmes and Watson is all over the place. At the beginning of the film, Holmes is portrayed as someone who only thinks he’s hyper-intelligent, but is actually more incompetent than the people around him. But a couple of scenes later, Holmes will actually be intelligent, and then the comedy will stem from the fact that the people surrounding him are portrayed as idiots.

The film is lazily written, too. It’s very difficult to tell whether it was supposed to be some kind of referential humour, but there’s a boxing scene which plays out almost exactly like a scene from one of the earlier Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes films (of which I wasn’t a fan, but compared to this one, they’re like Citizen Kane). The joke is, of course, that the method of taking out his foe doesn’t work, and he almost gets pummelled. But the film has no sense of comic timing, and by that point, the joke has already been used a couple of times, and just feels exhausting. The same is true of almost the entire script. There are chuckles here and there, but nowhere near enough to build a feature film on.

I’ll give Etan Cohen this: he was trying to make a clever comedy. Or at least, I think so. There are a couple of jokes which were designed to be political commentary, which are pretty much all critical of the Trump Administration. None of them are funny, but it’s a rare occasion in which the film is actually well-meaning. They’re well-tread comedic ground: jibes about America’s lack of gun control and its faux-democratic government. There’s an earlier scene in which Sherlock Holmes, having not yet found his signature hat, dons some kind of weird Make America Great Again fez. It’s a joke that has no political leanings, it’s just Etan Cohen telling the audience, “look, it’s that thing you recognise”.

A lot of the other jokes come across as less altruistic. There’s a lengthy running gag about one of Holmes’s maid having group orgies in Watson’s bedroom. Bizarrely, one of her partners is Mark Twain, and there’s another famous author in there too, who I’ve forgotten the name of. Most of the humour in the situation seems to stem from Holmes and Watson’s judgement of her sexual choices, and the film’s attitude towards sex makes the whole thing feel like a relic from a bygone era.

And then there are the anachronisms, some of which were clearly unintentional, though not all of them were. The film is set in the late nineteenth century. It allegedly starts in the year 1881, yet has a major plot point which revolves around the maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic, which never sailed until 1912. Either Etan Cohen never bothered to research the dates, or thought audiences wouldn’t have noticed. I’m not sure which is worse. Billy Zane (famous for playing the villainous Cal Hockley in James Cameron’s film) turns up for a pointless pick-up-the-check cameo, which lasts for all of five seconds, and the film ends.

Holmes & Watson: Conclusion

Those in the audience who managed to stick the entire thing out must have felt pretty short-changed. Holmes & Watson is likely to make even the least demanding cinema-goers feel as if they’ve had their intelligence insulted. Some people already consider Holmes and Watson to be one of the worst films of all time. It’s not difficult to understand why. It’s a real stinker.

Have you seen Holmes and Watson? What did you think? Let us know in the comments.

Holes & Watson was released in theaters in the US and the UK on December 25, 2018. For all international released dates, see here.