Greetings and welcome back to Raspberry Picking, where we look back at Golden Raspberry Award winners and nominees and decide whether they really deserve to be called the worst movies of all time. This month, we’re investigating the Sherlock Holmes “parody” Holmes & Watson, nominee for six Razzies, winner of four including Worst Picture, and tearer-apart of the partnership between actors Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly that had been a mainstay of 2000s loser comedies.
Oh no. I’m so terribly sad. Say it isn’t so.
It will surprise none of you to learn that I’m not a big fan of Will Ferrell.
Lift up your gates, O ye Princes, take away your power, whereby hitherto ye hold men fast in Hell.
You know how the Razzies feel about pretty actresses who have the temerity to star in bad movies? That’s pretty much how I feel about grown men who have made their careers out of playing obnoxious overgrown children. If I controlled the Razzies, Elf would have “won” Worst Picture of 2003 and several years afterward, pretty much until Land of the Lost came out in 2008. I understand that there’s an audience for this sort of movie, and they’re entitled to their wrong opinions; they have sustained the career of Mr. Ferrell for more than twenty years now. But even those loyal subjects couldn’t be bothered to show up for a little picture called Holmes & Watson that dropped into theaters at the end of 2018.
I was about to say that at least this poster doesn’t make me want to die, and then I saw the word HOLMIES in huge orange text at the top.
I trust I do not have to explain Arthur Conan Doyle’s consulting detective and his physician sidekick-biographer to Alternate Ending readers. He has been portrayed onscreen many times before and will be portrayed onscreen many more times, and because of his proliferation onscreen, new Holmes adaptations will always have to justify themselves to some extent. This one was supposed to be a parody both of the original stories and the action-heavy Guy Ritchie-helmed Jude Law-starring Holmes movies of 2009 and 2011. It was, to put it gently, not received as well as Ritchie’s two films.
There are a few standard paths to glory for Razzie winners: if it didn’t come out of some sordid collaboration of shady or mismatched figures, it probably spent years languishing in screenplay limbo before someone found it collecting dust on a shelf. In the case of Holmes & Watson, it was a little of both. When the project was first announced, Sacha Baron Cohen had been cast as Sherlock Holmes and Will Ferrell as Watson, with Etan Cohen on script (a role he would retain) and Judd Apatow producing. It then promptly disappeared for over a decade. That’s where the shady mismatched figures come in.
But Mandy, I hear you cry, Holmes & Watson eventually came to us from the early-2010s dream team of Ferrell, John C. Reilly, and producer Adam McKay! The creators of such classics as Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby and Step Brothers! Even if you don’t care for their style, how can you call them shady and mismatched?
Where do I start?
We’ll get to the matter of the two stars in time, but for now, let’s focus on the men behind the madness. Producer Adam McKay is now known for making lefty message movies that handle their subject matter with all the grace, deftness, and intellectual depth of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man trying to do a Viennese waltz, but back in the ‘90s and early 2000s, he was a head writer for Saturday Night Live, where he met his future writing partner Will Ferrell. The two of them enjoyed a commercially successful partnership, often including fellow funnyman Reilly, throughout the decade. They also comprised half the founding team of the humor website Funny or Die which specialized in rude, celebrity-studded absurdist humor.
Writer-director Etan Cohen, on the other hand, got his start partnering up with Mike Judge on Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill and the inexplicably beloved Idiocracy. His other writing credits include Tropic Thunder, Madagascar 2: Escape 2 Africa, and Men in Black 3, so his career had, to put it lightly, ups and downs. Regardless, Cohen’s movies are long-form single-story lowbrow projects, McKay is fundamentally a sketch comedian, and that difference in sensibility may have more than a little to do with their failure as a team.
Cohen’s first collaboration with McKay and Ferrell was the reviled crime-comedy Get Hard, which critics generally agreed was an unfunny waste of a promising premise. So the world may have already been giving Holmes & Watson some side-eye when it made its way to the big screen. That side-eye no doubt got even side-ier when the movie was not screened in advance for critics. And once word on it actually began to travel between mouths, well…
The critics, halfway through the movie.
Budget? $42 million. Box office? $30 million domestic, and barely scraped another $10 million overseas. Audiences were officially done showing up for these antics. Reports of mass walkouts flooded the entertainment press, and after its opening weekend, the only people going to see Holmes & Watson were the morbidly curious who wanted to know if it was really as bad as they had heard. I was not among these morbidly curious at the time, but here I am now.
So…was it?
THE STORY
I mean, it wasn’t acid-in-your-eyeballs excruciating like Dirty Love. And I think I hated it less than I hated Freddy Got Fingered. But if you forced me, I’d watch Freddy Got Fingered again over Holmes & Watson, because hate is at least a feeling, an experience that might reconnect you with your humanity on some level. Whereas to watch Holmes & Watson is to experience cinematic depression: sometimes you might try to force a smile onto your face, because you feel like you should be laughing, but at no point will you actually be laughing.
Holmes & Watson opens on a prologue featuring neither Will Ferrell nor John C. Reilly and containing lots of loud, horrible children. It is easily the best part of the movie.
Give all these little snots awards.
Young Sherlock Holmes (Hector Bateman-Harden) is dropped off at a prissy English boarding school by his doting mother (Laura Stevely). He discovers immediately after he walks through the wrought-iron gates that every other child there is a bullying criminal psychopath who cannot wait to give him wedgies. The first boy who notices him yells, “Look, the new kid! He looks poor!” I giggle, and sit back in anticipation of more pleasant surprises that will never come.
Young Sherlock develops a crush on a girl named Bridgette (Ella Bright), and his tormentors play a prank on him in which they blindfold him, lead him to Bridgette, and then let him press his lips to the hindquarters of a donkey instead. From that moment on, Young Sherlock vows to suppress all emotion and rely on his superhuman observational powers, which he uses on the spot to get all of his classmates expelled. His victory over them garners the admiration of Young John Watson (Codie-Lei Eastick), the janitor’s son, which marks the beginning of a lifelong friendship. I would like to see an entire boarding school movie parody about this collection of child-monsters. Unfortunately, what I am about to get is Holmes & Watson.
Fast-forward to 1896. Holmes (Ferrell, sporting an atrocious English accent) and now-Doctor Watson (Reilly, sporting a worse English accent) live together on Baker Street with their totally unsuspicious, not-at-all-out-of-place housekeeper Rose Hudson (Kelly MacDonald). Holmes’s archnemesis Professor James Moriarty (Ralph Fiennes, looking like he wants to die) stands trial for murder, but Holmes exposes “Moriarty” as an imposter who could not have committed the murder due to an awful prolonged masturbation joke. Over the objections of the sniveling, diminutive Inspector Lestrade (Rob Brydon), the fake Moriarty is released.
Holmes and Watson attend a surprise birthday party for Queen Victoria (Pam Ferris) and are shocked to discover a corpse hidden in her oversized cake, along with a note from Moriarty informing them that the queen will die in four days. When they go to perform the autopsy, they make the acquaintance of Dr. Grace Hart (Rebecca Hall, sporting a wretched American accent) and her mute, feral traveling companion Millie (Lauren Lapkus). These two serve two major functions in the film: they help set up a lot of dismal “jokes” about how men are sexist scum, and they act as love interests for the two protagonists. Because who better to play upon the heartstrings of Sherlock Holmes than a woman whose caretaker claims she has the mind of a four-year-old?
Just look at their hats and you might not think about how gross that is.
They determine that the murder victim was poisoned, and identify the poisoner as Gustav Klinger (Steve Coogan), an associate of Moriarty’s. Holmes also seeks help from his brother Mycroft (Hugh Laurie), who tells him that the murderer is someone close to him. (If you figured out half an hour ago that it’s Rose, congratulations, you’re a better detective than this Sherlock Holmes.) Watson, meanwhile, has been pestering Holmes to make him more of a partner in their consulting detective agency. This combination of suspicious facts makes Holmes begin to wonder: could Watson be the murderer? The extremely predictable series of revelations that Watson is not, in fact, the murderer lead the two men to the RMS Titanic, where the Queen will die unless they can smoke out the murderer once and for all. Or if they simply remind everyone that the Titanic wasn’t due to set sail until 1912.
THE BAD
There’s so much that is bad, and I don’t want to think or talk about any of it. It’s not fun-bad, none the sort of over-earnest incompetence and hubris that adorns all the best bad movies. It’s an empty, lazy sort of bad, bad defined by the absence of good, the bad that arises from people knowing they’re making garbage but wanting to keep collecting paychecks anyway.
I do not, for example, wish to spend more time thinking about the movie’s greatest sins, its dead-eyed, slack-jawed writing and acting. Really, most of the “bad” in Holmes & Watson boils down to “this comedy is not funny, not even in the juvenile way it intends to be.” Ferrell and Reilly grow increasingly visibly desperate as they repeatedly mistake loud, irritating mugging for humor. Ferrell, supposedly playing an emotionless deduction machine, instead seems to be playing Albert from The Birdcage, but sapped of all that character’s authenticity and warmth. Reilly, for his part, is content to follow Ferrell’s lead and do very little to distinguish himself, and as a result, his performance consists of one horribly garbled and off-key note. Since they didn’t have a live audience, they couldn’t have known for sure their routine was bombing, yet they seem to realize it anyway. The flop sweat penetrates the film to its core.
And this is where I arrive at my claim that Ferrell and Reilly are at heart a horribly mismatched pair. The two seem to like and admire each other a great deal, and it often looks like they’re having fun shouting improvised idiocy at each other. But they are simply not good at the same things. Think for a moment about some of the films in which Reilly has been great. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. The Little Hours. We Need to Talk About Kevin. John C. Reilly shines when he gets to play offbeat folky weirdos, not Will Ferrell-style morons. In Will Ferrell pictures, he gets stuck imitating Will Ferrell, and he’s not especially good or likable at doing that. If Holmes & Watson did one good thing, it was to give John C. Reilly permission to be himself again. I hope he uses it productively.
We interrupt your regularly scheduled Raspberry Picking for this Public Service Announcement: If you have not seen The Little Hours, this scene is, hand to God, one of the absolute funniest things I have ever seen on a television screen. Do not watch Holmes & Watson. Watch The Little Hours.
I also no longer want to think about the brain-melting series of cheap political jokes, ranging from a red “Make England Great Again” fez that Holmes briefly sports in his quest for a suitable hat, to Grace bragging that in America, we have democracy, and our system ensures that we always elect suitable leaders of high moral character. Yes, Adam McKay and Etan Cohen, we know you don’t like Donald Trump. Most of us who share your feelings would prefer not to have to think about him when we don’t have to, which means we are not inclined to thank you for anachronistic “jokes” of which the only purpose is to show everyone what good, correctly-opinioned people you are.
Nor am I happy to remember the prolonged scene in which we watch Will Ferrell barf loudly and theatrically not one but three times; nor the scene in which Holmes invents the “drunk text” and Watson forces a telegram operator (Oliver Maltman, who deserves workman’s comp) to take a picture of his penis and send it to Grace; nor an equally wretched scene in which Holmes and Watson force Queen Victoria to take a Victorian-era “self-photograph” with them and then almost kill her by bashing her head with the camera; nor the lightning-fast mental-math calculation that Holmes performs of exactly in what fashion he should drunkenly urinate on himself; nor the criminal waste of Hugh Laurie as Sherlock’s brother Mycroft Holmes in a scene that could just as easily be axed from the film. Most of all I do not wish to think further about the overlong climax aboard the Titanic, which in 1896 would not set sail for another sixteen years. If any single element of the film can stand in for the contemptuous laziness of the whole project…well, take your pick.
I hope I ever get paid as much money for anything as Billy Zane probably got for this cameo.
THE GOOD
All right, we’ve established, to what I’m sure is everyone’s shock, that Holmes & Watson is overwhelmingly composed of rancid, self-satisfied toenail fungus thinly disguised as moviemaking. Can I find something nice to say? I always can.
After a great deal of thought, I have identified three good things in Holmes & Watson. These three things are completely disconnected from each other and any of them could be removed from the film without affecting its structure, so the fundamentals of the film all remain quite terrible. But we have to accept joy when it is offered to us.
The first good thing, as previously mentioned, is the opening scene at the boarding school, Etan Cohen’s single joke in the whole damn movie that begins with a solid funny premise and draws that premise all the way through to its punchline, and Hector Bateman-Harden is uncannily good at mimicking Ferrell’s facial tics. The second good thing is the costume design by Beatrix Aruna Pasztor, the hero Holmes & Watson needed but certainly did not deserve. She decks Ferrell out in flamboyant shirtfronts that contrast nicely with Watson’s more staid three-piece suits and do more to differentiate the characters in any of the script. Hall and Lapkus, in the meantime, wear impractical but striking Victorian gowns – Hall again more muted and traditional, Lapkus always adorned with something ridiculous – that if nothing else are just amazing to look at, and by God, we need something in this movie that we actually want to look at.
Finally, there’s the song.
Oh, don’t act surprised.
No less a musical giant than Alan Menken and lyricist Glenn Slater showed up to write an original climactic song for Holmes & Watson. Holmes must, of course, end his emotional journey by once again learning to feel the feelings he has suppressed for so long, and since this is a bro comedy, those feelings must be a certain minimum level of homoerotic. How better to express such feelings than in a Broadway duet that bursts into the film like the Kool-Aid Man. As the falsely-accused Watson is being led to his prison cell, . It has no business whatsoever being in a movie. But it’s a decent number, and Ferrell and Reilly have more than enough vocal chops between them to pull it off way better than they pulled off anything else in the previous 75 minutes.
So these are all good things. I’m glad, I suppose, that they exist. They do not even begin to justify the existence of Holmes & Watson, which otherwise exudes a radioactive sort of pointlessness and despair. It’s the movie I was afraid Wild Wild West would be. Where that movie told stupid jokes that were funny, this movie tells stupid jokes that barely qualify as jokes. It’s a sad, sordid affair in which the goal seems to be to make everyone except John C. Reilly and Will Ferrell miserable. I wish I could take pleasure in the fact that it caused the rest of the world to see the rotten foundation of the Ferrell/Reilly/McKay Thing that some of us had seen much earlier, but I can take no joy in such a sad, feeble final chapter to anyone’s story. If you are really itching for a funny Sherlock Holmes in your life – one with a great song, no less! – I suggest you stick to The Great Mouse Detective.
Quality of Movie: 1.5 / 5. That extra half star is for Beatrix Aruna Pasztor and her alone.
Quality of Experience: 1 / 5. If you’re one of the lucky ones, you’ll fall asleep midway through.
You can read Tim’s review of Holmes & Watson here!
Mandy Albert teaches high school English and watches movies – mostly bad, occasionally good – in the psychedelic swamplands of South Florida. She is especially fond of 1970s horror and high-sincerity, low-talent vanity projects. You can listen to her and her husband talk about Star Trek: Enterprise on their podcast At Least There’s a Dog! You can also follow Mandy on Letterboxd.