Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly have made some true comedy classics. Any time that Step Brothers or Talladega Nights is randomly on TV, it’s hard to not stop and laugh for a few minutes.
But, something went terribly, terribly wrong with their latest, a new take on the Sherlock Holmes stories. Their new movie Watson and Holmes currently has a 6% on Rotten Tomatoes, officially making it one of the worst-reviewed movies of the year. John Travolta’s Gotti and a movie called London Fields are the only 2018 films to earn a 0%, but a 6% is still really, really bad. Those movies were small releases, with low stakes and low expectations. This is a massive studio comedy.
This puts it in God’s Not Dead 2 (8%)/Nicolas Cage Left Behind territory (1%).
Here are a few review highlights:
[lborder]“Holmes & Watson is one of those movies that goes beyond unfunny and into a comedy-cubist zone, where jokes are no longer recognizable and laughter is philosophically impossible” (Newsday).
“The whole thing feels like someone took the unfunny outtakes that might have adorned the end credits and stretched them out into their own film” ) (RogerEbert.com).
If you choose to watch this movie, you’ll be treated to an hour and a half of different versions of the same gag: what if [insert modern thing] somehow existed in Victorian times!? (Entertainment Weekly)
An astoundingly lame SNL skit stretched out to excruciating feature length (Flickering Myth)
[/lborder]Yikes. At least there’s Netflix.
