The Sheep Detectives: Baa-fflingly Stupid Family Fare (Early Review)

Most films, in some way, find a target audience. Given that there are roughly eight-and-a-half billion people on the planet, there has to be something for everyone. “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” right? Not always. For better or worse, I tend to meet them in the middle and match their wavelengths, though there come times when one can’t quite pinpoint who they were made for. One such film is The Sheep Detectives, an adaptation of Leonie Swann’s Three Bags Full, directed by Kyle Balda and penned by Craig Mazin (yes, that one). An American-made British production of a German novel, The Sheep Detectives is a confusingly identity-less work devised for grandparents who couldn’t bear to take their kin to see The Super Mario Galaxy Movie instead.

After her mystery-novel-loving shepherd George Hardy (Jackman) is mysteriously poisoned, it is up to his smartest sheep (Julia-Louis Dreyfus) to solve the mystery and catch the culprit. In both form and content, the film feels more like a throwaway 30 Rock bit than a mainstream studio production led by A-list talent. Even if The Sheep Detectives is — coincidentally — inoffensive and harmless, its greatest infraction is the notion that it’s live-action. Not all of its flaws would dissipate if this were an animated film, though it would, at the very least, look much less garish. The visual language (or lack thereof) speaks to the tonal crisis at hand, where it wants to appeal to everyone while appealing to no one.

Disgusting CGI sheep aside, The Sheep Detectives becomes truly puzzling when the conceit’s inherent goofiness is sidelined for earnest sentimentality. It’s a net positive that the film doesn’t subject its audience to irony-poisoned dreck or Cocomelon brainrot, though this surely can’t be the best we have to offer the future generations. There are some pretty solid jokes, such as a butcher falling asleep while counting the flock or a chicken crossing the road, but those Naked Gun-like bits are a rarity compared to inter-ovine drama and a thoroughly uninteresting murder mystery. Mazin’s screenplay (whose recent writing makes Chernobyl look like a lucky fluke) is either too goofy, or too solemn, morphing from a whodunnit to a “who the hell greenlit this?”

Maybe it’s a self-report to admit to not having read the source material before watching this adaptation, though The Sheep Detectives will likely not inspire many audiences to want to get their hands even dirtier. It might be bafflingly stupid enough to horseshoe one’s potential disdain into some kind of morbid curiosity, although it is not good when a children’s film has the same vibe as watching a multi-car collision in slow motion. Anyone under the age of nine would, in some vein, probably enjoy a (preferably animated) movie about talking sheep, though there’s one particularly morbid scene that could trigger some younger audiences. It’s a mix of a bad concept (this is Balda’s first live-action feature) and misuse of said concept.

All murder mysteries hinge on a stellar ensemble, and, shockingly, The Sheep Detectives ensemble is anything but. Between Braun doing an abominable British accent and Patrick Stewart voicing a fundamentalist ram, nearly every performance feels like they are just taking a quick paycheck (who can blame them?). Thompson, meanwhile, phones it in to a degree previously unheard of from an actress of her renown, though it’s not like she’s given much to work with in the first place. Out of the human cast, Molly Gordon is easily the MVP, and the same goes for Chris O’Dowd as the most psychologically tortured sheep on Earth. Almost everyone else (including Bryan Cranston) gives complete non-performances, as the film has little to no sense of identity.

The Sheep Detectives isn’t bad enough to be memorable, which is both a blessing and a curse. A cash grab this is not, but the biggest mystery is what this film is, who it’s for, and what twisted sequence of events led to this point. It may have some legs (hooves?) in the theatre on the pretense that it is the only kids’ movie in theaters that’s neither Mario, nor Andy Serkis’ animated adaptation of Animal Farm, which sounds like scraping the bottom of the barrel as far as children’s entertainment. If it could be summed up in a sentence, it would be that The Sheep Detectives is an American-made British comedy for your grandma, and will surely play like gangbusters in the nursing home.

still courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios

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Luca Mehta