Review: Holmes & Watson: The Game is A-Starting!
Ok, look, I admit it. Holmes & Watson isn’t a good movie. It’s puerile and idiotic. Its climax takes place with Queen Victoria on the Titanic, even though Queen Victoria died more than a decade before the Titanic left port for the first and only time. Will Ferrell plays Holmes as an image-obsessed (albeit genius) jackass, and there’s a whole sequence that involves projectile vomit and a cake-smeared corpse that I definitely could do without.
But the plain fact is, this film is really really funny. I laughed from start to finish. Well. Except for the vomit-cake-autopsy. But you can always plan your bathroom break for that bit.
I’m convinced that the reason I enjoyed this movie is because I intended to enjoy it. I didn’t go see it out of some sense of “Sherlockian duty” or because I decided I needed to see it to be able to espouse an honest hatred for it. I happily took my family—my husband, my parents, my brother, and his wife—to the cinema on Boxing Day, and we all went in expecting to be entertained.
When one of us laughed, we all laughed, and by the time a drunken Holmes is using advanced Robert-Downey-Jr-style-brain-calculus to pee in an ally without splashing his shoes, (and failing because he’s too drunk to remember to open his fly), I thought I would have to get an oxygen tank for my brother and my dad.
Here is a short list of laughs worth having:
- Watson wildly unloading his service revolver into a swarm of killer bees.
- A visit to the Diogenes Club, where a plaque on the door reads “A place for geniuses to avoid people like you”. Enjoy a bonus Hugh Laurie cameo as brother Mycroft, with whom Sherlock communicates telepathically, so immense is their collective intellect.
- A lengthy parody of the bareknuckle boxing scene in the first RDJ film. The match, which features great physical comedy, takes place in a gymnasium where a spin class on giant comical penny farthings is going on in the background.
- Holmes and Watson, convinced they’ve murdered the queen, try desperately to dispose of the body. When Ferrell starts punching her in the butt to get her to fit in a steamer trunk… gold.
- Really, the entire climax on the Titanic, historical accuracy be damned. No spoilers, though. you’ll have to see it for yourself.
When the first trailer for the film was released, I predicted that it would, despite a mélange of nonsense, get the Holmes/Watson relationship right. And I feel vindicated on that front. Fundamentally, the story is about their friendship, and the genuine fun that Ferrell and John C. Reilly are obviously having shows. The film is worth the price of admission for that alone.
Holmes & Watson will not be, to paraphrase another far-from-canonical adaptation, everyone’s glass of tea. It will never be a classic; I don’t even think it’s destined to be an underground cult favorite. But if you give it a chance—go with the intention of being entertained—it may just be the Sherlock Holmes film with the soaring Alan Mencken Holmes-Watson love duet you never knew you needed.
Ashley D. Polasek holds a PhD in English, with a specialty in adaptations of Sherlock Holmes, a subject on which she has published in Adaptation, Literature/Film Quarterly, Transformative Works and Cultures, Viewfinder, and The Journal of Victorian Culture Online, among others. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and an Honourary Research Fellow at the Centre for Adaptations at De Montfort University.
Ashley is the co-editor, with Lyndsay Faye, of Behind the Canonical Screen (BSI Press, 2016) and the co-editor, with Prof. Deborah Cartmell, of The Blackwell Companion to the Biopic (Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming 2018). You can follow her on Twitter @SherlockPhD
Speaking of the Alan Mencken Holmes-Watson love duet. It isn’t on the soundtrack! ANyone know how I can get it? Or at least the lyrics?
So, I went to see it, thanks to you and Brad, and I’m glad I did. Thank you! I didn’t laugh as much, but I was pretty much alone in the theater. I did smile a lot, though, and I want the DVD!