This week, the almighty Gods of Amazon Prime felt humbled enough to allow us measly Prime subscribers to stream 2018 comedy leviathan Holmes & Watson for free* as opposed to usually having to pay £4.49 to rent it for 72 hours or whatever. And how blessed we are to be able to enjoy this universally derided, critically eviscerated, and culturally detested piece of modern cinema without paying more than our usual subscription fee!
I like Will Ferrell. I've seen Anchorman 1 and 2 and they're... good... just good... movies and he is funny, amusing and likeable in those movies. I like John C. Reilly. I haven't seen the more serious stuff he does but I have it on good authority (my mum) that he's pretty good and I've seen him with Will Ferrell before now in Step Brothers, a movie I must have watched about 4 times at this point because apparently my circles of friends over the years all really like that film... they are good actors. Let's look at this cast rundown just quickly; Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly, Ralph Fiennes, Rob Brydon, Steve Coogan, Hugh fucking Laurie. How did they fuck this up?! Kelly MacDonald and Rebecca Hall who I admittedly didn't recognize from anything prior going into this, but they were also pretty good. How do you have such a pool of talent and produce such an underwhelming movie?!
It wasn't Step Brothers. There was no re-capturing of the magic here. I'm aware after checking that the only tenuous link between the 2 films is that they both star the same lead role actors and that the similarities end there but I at least vaguely remember the hype train billing it as a Step Brothers reunion, the first since Anchorman 2 from 2013. And there is no fucking residual magic trickling down from Step Brothers, or fucking Anchorman 2, dribbling into the dying embers of this movie, not in any part. Not even in the bits where Ferrell and Reilly try to force it themselves. It has gone, vanished, died.
But this is entirely not the fault of the cast, in my opinion, who I felt all did a pretty decent job. Millicent (Lauren Lapkus) is arguably the most interesting thing about this whole movie, playing a cameo role as a psychologically undeveloped girl with cat mannerisms but it's all the easter egg stuff in the background she gets up to, her facial expressions, her mannerisms, that was about the best bit in this movie.
Neither do I think Ferrell or Reilly potentially underperforming to be damaging, I think they worked with the best they had to work with, which I don't think was alot. You can really feel they strained to recapture the Step Brothers magic with the puns, the gross out humour, the slapstick comedy but it felt stale, felt old, it didn't strike lucky this time around. It just felt like it had been done before. And that therein is almost where this movie fails the most. We've seen it all before. There isn't much fresh here. The Victorian England set dressing, the portrayal of Holmes as being a bumbling neer-do-well who by happenstance somehow succeeds without even trying was to a degree, fresh, but there have been Victorian England comedies that have done things better than this. There were puns, there were jokes that got a snort out of me, and the references to future technology being portrayed as cutting edge developments we're at least cute, but not side splittingly funny. It needed more icing to go on the topping of this cake and it was a severely under-decorated cake.
They needed to pick a path and stick to it. They were at a crossroads: do we go down the route of making a completely over-the-top slapstick humour based in Victorian London with ridiculous over charismatic stereotypes and an entirely loose narrative, or do we try and cut this as mostly serious mystery movie with plot development and a storyline, but with sprinklings of clever wit and comedy. Instead they chose neither, they chose some kind of hazy, middle ground, a grey area and it failed on both fronts.
I had genuine reservations about going into this, because I knew it's reputation. It got disembowed by the critics and even fans of Will Ferrell called it a steaming pile of fucking horseshit. You will notice I haven't gone into detail on cinematography and soundtrack, there's really no point; cinematography was mostly fine. Soundtrack; mostly fine, but the inclusion of modern music into set pieces felt ill fitting, aside from that there's not much point. This movie was dead in the water from about 15 minutes in when I started to figure out how this was going to develop. Apparently audiences at test screenings felt the same way as me. I didn't hate it, I think only because Lauren Lapkus saved it (cast her in something better than this tripe, immediately) and Will Ferrell as Holmes was genuinely a pretty decent portrayal other than that it was a complete waste of a respectable and interesting cast of Actors with some of the most reliable and explorable source material you could ever have the grace of being gifted with. 1 out of 5.
*- free to existing Amazon Prime subscribers
