UPDATE: It now appears that the film’s rating has been bumped up to 6%.
Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly’s Holmes & Watson is currently being utterly barbecued by critics and audiences alike. Earlier in the day (at the time of writing), it was sitting at a kinda impressive 0% Fresh Rating on Rotten Tomatoes. We say ‘kinda impressive’ because not many films have managed that.
I should add that this doesn’t appear to be one of those bizarre Venom style moments where pretty much every critic misunderstands the film while the audience love it, either. It currently has a 25% positive audience rating on the site, which indicates that the general public despises Holmes & Watson nearly as much as those high-falutin big city Ivy League film critics.
As usual in these cases, it seems that most of the entertainment value will come from reading the reviews. Rafer Guzman of Newsday memorably describes it “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.” David Fear in Rolling Stone, meanwhile, says, “at one point in Holmes & Watson, a character goes undercover as a manure salesman and begins screaming, “Horseshit for sale! Will anyone buy my horse’s shit?” It’s the one genuinely honest, self-aware moment in the movie.” And Peter Sobczynski at RogerEbert.com perhaps has the neatest summary, writing: “this is probably the biggest cinematic clunker of the season.”
Sadly, I think we probably could’ve seen this one coming if we’d been paying attention to the promotion (or lack thereof). Not only did it have a very subdued marketing campaign despite having two theoretically bankable stars front and centre, but the studio refused to screen the movie for critics prior to its release, presumably hoping to sneak it into cinemas before anyone got wind that it was a big bag of shite.
Oh well, now we all know. I guess the moral of the story is to avoid Holmes & Watson.
