Remember that scene in Step Brothers, when a sleepwalking Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly end up wrecking their parents kitchen? My god, that was hilarious. What about that part in Talladega Nights, when Ferrells NASCAR champion and his best friend/sidekick say grace at the dinner table (Dear Tiny Jesus, your golden fleece diapers and tiny little balled-up fists )? So riotous. Or how about any random scene from, say, Anchorman or Walk Hard? You cant go wrong with the formers Afternoon Delight sing-along, or anything in the latter involving drugs or Dewey Coxs Dylan phase. Were crying just thinking about them.
Its easier, not to mention far less agonizing, to go back and just reminisce about those Ferrell/Reilly greatest-hits moments than to try and reckon with Holmes & Watson. Its so painfully unfunny were not sure it can legally be called a comedy. Lets put it another way: You know that story about the monkey paw, where a grieving mother wishes for something and her wish comes true, only its all twisted and wrong and horrible? Someone may have gotten a hold of one of those talismans and said, Id love a Step Brothers reunion, maybe with a recognizable I.P. and then a rotting, shambling corpse is suddenly knocking on the multiplex doors. The idea of giving Arthur Conan Doyles famous characters to a great screen duo surely seemed like a genius idea. Youd almost have to willfully want to squander the notion to screw it up this badly. Youd also have to be ignorant of the fact that, even if with A-list comic talent capable of turning this into more than just the sum of its wink-nudge Sherlock-foolery, you have to give them something more than a rough sketch to work with. That, dear friends, is elementa sorry, were too depressed by this whole thing to even finish the joke.
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Perhaps its best to use deductive logic to figure out what exactly happened here. Observe, the high concept/low return ratio, suggesting someone merely scribbled down an elevator pitch at the last second before a meeting Um, Ferrell and Reilly as, ah, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson then were surprised to suddenly get a greenlight. Look closely at the recognizable traits of Ferrells master detective and Reillys beta-male sidekick, all of which are slightly exaggerated for effect and retro-fitted for the stars personae yet never really utilized beyond reiterating: Yup, hes smart but also arrogant and stupid, and the other guys his buddy! The desperate, extreme mugging of both actors truly, a telltale sign that even they realized that the story, involving the escape of Holmes archenemy Moriarty (really, Ralph Fiennes? Really?) and a plot to kill the Queen, wasnt much to hang gags upon, so theyd better make faces ASAP.
Notice, amateur sleuths, the anachronistic touches Selfies! Pay-Per-View! MAGA hats! and in-case-of-emergency-hit-someone-in-head crappy slapstick in lieu of an almost complete absence of actual jokes. Behold how a sequence involving Watson and Rebecca Halls female medical practitioner is take-off on a scene from Ghost, a movie thats almost 30 years old, yet theres a generic hip-hop-lite soundtrack in a how do you do, fellow kids? attempt to be hip. (Theres also a character who pretends to be a cat, because why not?) Peruse the IMDb page of one Etan Cohen, a gent with an impressive screenwriting resum (he had a hand in the scripts for Idiocracy and Tropic Thunder), yet is the director responsible for the wretched Ferrell/Kevin Hart 2015 project Get Hard. Kindly note how what should have been no-brainer wins, like an Alan Menken-penned musical number and several parodies of slo-mo scenes la the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock movies, are virtually smothered in the crib.
And as we close the case file on this crime, perhaps its worth jotting down in the dossier that while its not unusual for studios to not screen movies for critics and whatnot ahead of time, the combination of a somewhat muted marketing campaign and slipping it into theaters on Christmas sans much promotion suggests that even the distributors knew they had a cut-bait situation on their hands. Also: You can only swindle audiences by thinking you simply throw A-list stars in anything and people will still show up, drooling like Pavlovs pups, for so long before the echo in empty theaters is deafening. At one point in Holmes & Watson, a character goes undercover as a manure salesman and begins screaming, Horseshit for sale! Will anyone buy my horses shit? Its the one genuinely honest, self-aware moment in the movie.
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