Holmes & Watson Review – IGN

By William Bibbiani

There is a scene in Etan Cohen’s Holmes & Watson where Sherlock Holmes, played by Will Ferrell, puts on a bad fake mustache and somehow fools Dr. Watson, played by John C. Reilly, into thinking he’s a completely different person. It’s not a great joke, but it’s illuminating. The filmmakers also seem to think that by slapping on a ramshackle disguise they can trick audiences into thinking Holmes & Watson isn’t just a pale imitation of Talladega Nights and Step Brothers.

But when Step Brothers and Talladega Nights would whiff a joke, both movies quickly moved on to a better one. Holmes & Watson is a collection of limp comic set pieces and repeated riffs on the same three gags: Joke A. The 21st century is different from the Victorian era; Joke B. Holmes isn’t as smart as he thinks he is; and Joke C. Blunt force trauma to the face.

Holmes & Watson is a reunion, of sorts, for Ferrell and Reilly. The duo starred in the two aforementioned beloved comedies in the 2000s and haven’t shared a title card since (although they have done a few cameos). Theirs was an unusual but amusing comedy dynamic, in which both actors played total buffoons, trying to out-buffoon each other. When it worked it was gut-bustingly funny, and when it failed at least it looked like the actors were having fun.

Taking this established Ferrell/Reilly dynamic and adapting it to Sherlock Holmes and John Watson to transform the characters into bromantic oddballs isn’t even much of a leap; they’ve been a mismatched pair since the very beginning, and Holmes was a baffling eccentric from his first page onward. The hangdog expression on Reilly’s face as Ferrell’s Holmes hogs the spotlight suits the characters, and Ferrell’s immature overachiever schtick isn’t bad either. The idea is sound, the execution (sadly) isn’t even laughable.

Holmes & Watson follows Holmes from being a bullied schoolboy to becoming the top crime-solver in London alongside his best friend Watson. (In the film’s funniest scene, the young Holmes shuts down his emotions to run on pure intellect and begins to “un-cry,” sucking his tears back into his tear ducts, and proceeds to use his investigative brilliance to get literally every other kid in the school expelled for their secret wrongdoings.) The movie kicks off when Holmes bursts into the trial of his arch-nemesis, Moriarty (Ralph Fiennes), and frees the criminal mastermind, telling the court that the real Moriarty escaped to America.

Whether Holmes is right, the movie takes its sweet time saying. Indeed, it’s hard to tell whether Holmes & Watson thinks he’s a brilliant weirdo or an overrated egomaniac. Sometimes Ferrell’s Holmes makes brilliant deductions and other times he’s so overwhelmingly obtuse you start to wonder if it’s some kind of triple-fake out, and he’s only acting dumb to hide the genius that he put on a totally separate layer of dumb to hide in the first place. But no, it’s merely inconsistent; he’s an oaf if the filmmakers think it’s funny and he’s a mastermind when they think that would be funnier. And since that makes it hard to catch your bearings and tell when the stupidity or genius is supposed to be unexpected, and therefore actually make you laugh, it’s hard to be amused.

Holmes’s investigations lead him to drunken sidequests, including the invention of the first drunk text (or rather, “intoxigram”), and into the arms of a pair of American women: Dr. Grace Hart (Rebecca Hall), whom neither Holmes nor Watson can believe is a real doctor, because she’s not a man, and her test subject Millie (Lauren Lapkus), who was raised by stray cats.

Holmes and Watson solve puzzles and get in fights and make pointed remarks to Grace and Millie about how America is a nation of gun-lovers, while Grace and Millie reminds them that America founded a whole democracy to prevent “trumped up charlatans” from running the country (rimshot). Naturally, their bromance is tested and Holmes learns a valuable lesson, but it’s not like anyone’s here for the storyline. We’re here for Ferrell and Reilly.

And again, they’re back to the same old schtick. Holmes & Watson plays like a strange “premake” of Talladega Nights, taking the same basic comedy dynamic and sending it into the past for a change of clothes, a change of location, and the same three jokes, told over and over again. If that’s all your looking for, it’s right here, but we can’t help but feel that we — and everyone in the cast — deserved better.