Holmes & Watson (2018)

Holmes & Watson is the kind of movie you make when you don't give a shit anymore, really. This is a woefully insane movie that had Tony and I just wondering what kind of gambling debts Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly had to settle that led them to do this shit. It's getting press as one of the worst movies of the year and had a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes at first – now it's gotten to the clandestined, unparalleled highs of 8%. Hallelujah!

But what exactly is it that makes it so godawful? Well, strap in, kids!

Director: Etan Cohen

Starring: Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly, Ralph Fiennes

IMDb

Co-written with Tony.

This thing starts off with a young Sherlock Holmes as a child going to a British boarding school, where all the kids are mean to him and force him to kiss the backside of a donkey by blindfolding him – hey, you little jackasses, what do you think this is, Bird Box? And they made fun of him because he did the thing THEY TRICKED HIM to do. What imagination! What candor! You really showed him by executing a planned trick and him falling for it! The height of comedy!

In response, young Holmes immediately, like as he’s standing there humiliated, becomes super smart, cold and detached – he even makes his tears recede back into his body, which is something I imagine alt-right assholes wish they could do to mask their own insecurities. Then he gets every other kid expelled from school for various things he immediately deduces they've done – I wonder what their parents think about this. BUT AT LEAST SHERLOCK GOT HIS EDUCATION, THE LITTLE NARC.

No, seriously; every teacher just teaches him alone for the rest of his time there, I guess. No other students were admitted? Nobody found this weird? OK then, movie.

Then we fast forward to years later as Sherlock Holmes and Watson are world-class detectives, ready to solve any case. Well, actually they’re complete idiots and weirdos, only Holmes occasionally has a burst of deduction to solve whatever hamfisted case they come across. I guess all that specialized education for Holmes didn’t bother to teach him even the most basic things about how to interact in the real world. They get drawn into some kind of mystery involving someone threatening to kill the queen, I guess, although personally I’d trust any random homeless man on the street a thousand times before I hired these obvious deviant maniacs. I’d be afraid of these guys murdering me in my sleep. They’re fucking bonkers.

I mean, a lot of the rest of the movie doesn’t even make enough sense to critique in my usual way - the plot is a lot of nonsense that’s silly on purpose, and the main issue is that it’s weird instead of funny like 99% of the time. These gags are so strange that you’d swear they were working off some ancient parchment full of things an alien civilization found funny hundreds of millennia ago - they’re certainly not funny now. There’s a lot of shots of characters eating raw onions for some reason? A lot of random vomiting? A scene where two characters exchange a romantic glance while performing an autopsy?

It’s just head-scratching. It’s gibberish. Even when the comedy isn’t outwardly terrible like in the first scene of him as a kid, it’s so confusing and bizarre that you don’t laugh anyway.

Then there are the scenes that take up the majority of the film where they just extend lame gags for long enough that they could call this a full length movie rather than a serial killer’s demo reel for SNL. There’s one segment where they break a bee hive conspicuously in Holmes’ apartment and spend several minutes messing around with that - there’s no reason why they have it there except for this gag and the plot doesn’t advance at all, so it’s pretty much a hollow thing and wastes all of our time. If you could fast forward past an entire comedy segment and your movie doesn’t lose much, maybe it sucks… well, maybe it’d be fine if it were legitimately funny, but we know that ship sailed when we saw the first scene.

The second one they do involves the queen coming over, you know, like she does. They end up knocking her unconscious, and then there’s a long sequence of them trying to hide her body, using an obviously fake voice that nobody catches onto, and finally almost chopping her body to pieces with a hacksaw! Wow! I wonder what repercussions there will be for that and what comedic reactions we’ll get! Oh, nothing at all and this was a non-sequitur? OK then.

Seriously - without some of these scenes this would probably be basically a short film. The padding is so much that you could heal a guy with horrific back pain by just lying them down on this movie’s rolls of fat. It’s like a cloud. No substance at all.

There’s really zero point in going into all the other random shit that happens… just to gloss over it, they meet two women from America who fall in love with them, because this is that kind of movie. Also there’s some really dumb dialogue about how America is so noble and has a democracy and a fair justice system. So, you know, if you were thinking this movie was gonna be the second coming of Sartre, you’re wrong about that.

I guess at the end of the movie, Holmes figures out the killer must be someone close to him who can predict what he’s going to do, and so with no real reason he suspects Watson, having him arrested and almost hanged. It turns out, through an overly-long, dragging sequence, that we figure out he’s really just upset because Watson was going to leave him and be with the American woman - so, great reason to do all this! What a stand-up guy! This movie doesn’t have the complexity to tackle stuff like this, and it’s somehow glossed over and done lazily even though they spend time on it.

Anyway, that’s Holmes and Watson. It’s a baffling piece of cinema. Some parts are so weird they border on avant garde, and then you just get other things that are fairly normal, dumb-ass comedy without much in the way of any humor. By the end of the movie it seriously slows down and becomes a more generic picture and this is where it pretty much lost me. Most of the things that happen are inconsequential, and so the movie as a whole tends to feel like a waste of time.

It’s not good, but for those curious like we were due to the awful reviews… well, don’t bother. It sucks. That’s pretty much all there is to it.

Image copyright of its original owners; we don't own it.

We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011)

Right from the title, this is suspect. That's a seriously unwieldy, awkward title – not sure there'll be any T-shirts of that one. And there also won't be any T-shirts because nobody would ever want to touch such an appalling film. We Need To Talk About Kevin is a miserable film and I am here to tell you why.

Director: Lynne Ramsay

Starring: Tilda Swinton, Ezra Miller

IMDb

I guess this is one of those 'evil kid' movies that was for some reason popular through the years – like the Omen, the Good Son, and so on. Only this time he gets to grow up and we see that it's 100% what you'd expect, a violent sociopath that makes American Psycho look like a well adjusted individual. Who needs surprises in a movie anyway, right?

The movie is done in a jumbled fashion where scenes are shown out of order, for no real discernible reason. I guess they wanted to create some kind of tension or mystery, but the effect this creates is just a simulation of walking into a meeting halfway through and missing all context. For like the first 20 minutes, I was just scratching my head – it was too difficult to tell what the actual story was. There are a few scenes of Tilda Swinton's main character Eva being bombarded with red paint on her house and screamed threats that she's a murderer, a few scenes of her and John C. Reilly as the husband playing with small children and some others of Eva in some other country doing activist work. None of it is put together well. It's like if a small child holding a jigsaw puzzle sneezed and dropped all the pieces everywhere, and then we just made that into a movie to placate him.

I guess eventually we start to see the real story – Eva's son Kevin is, shock and awe, a weird, bad kid! He does wacky shit like mess up Eva's paintings and cry all the time when she's holding him. Wow. What a truly horrible thing and you deserve sympathy more than other people. Though there's at least one scene where she's holding him as a baby and says, with real malice, that she was happy before Kevin was born and now just wants to cry all the time I guess. Gee, real surprise he didn't turn out well... we never return to this again, but honestly, I'd love to see a smarter movie actually tackle bad parenting like that. Too bad this one isn't it.

The movie isn't a fan of brevity or getting to the point, as we cycle through endless vague time-hopping scenes, like a drunk Dr. Who episode, switching from a miserable and enervated looking Eva trying to keep afoot when everyone hates her, to Eva with her family and kids in the past. There are a lot of just boring as fuck scenes of Eva in some office building that finally hires her. And there's one set at Halloween when an army of awful children pound on the windows screaming for candy – Jesus. Where do kids act like this? I want to know so I can recommend we quarantine that hellish place for all of time.

When it isn't showing those pointless scenes, you get downright awful and miserable scenes of Eva trying to relate to her hopelessly sociopathic son. I love the one scene where she's telling him he can decorate his own room to show his personality, and he goes “what personality?” The kid's delivery is just so hammy and the line itself is such dogshit that I'm tempted to say the kid could've done better if he wrote his own dialogue.

There's also a scene where Eva is teaching him to count and, to prove he can, counts from one to 50 in a very obnoxious manner, and then shits his pants. I guess the pants-shitting was meant to rebel against his mother. Truly this kid is the next incarnate of punk rock. Then he farts as he's walking away and she throws him against a wall, breaking his arm. More of those amazing parenting skills! I'm amazed this woman could ever create a child who wasn't well adjusted!

Honestly, I get it – the kid is “just evil.” It isn't the mother's fault because this is a stupid movie that doesn't care about actually saying anything. This is just agonizing, dull scene after agonizing, dull scene of the kid tormenting her and, after she breaks his arm, basically blackmailing her. There's a scene where he makes her go home instead of getting something she needs at the store because of that. Wow, what a riveting scene if you're 89 years old and in a coma. A real nail-biter.

It isn't any better when they grow up and there's a second kid born – if anything, it gets worse when Kevin is a teenager because now he is as pretentious as your average dude-bro atheist philosophy “expert,” only also a psycho fuck. There's a scene where he jerks off in front of his mom, if you were wondering if there was. I know you were. And there's one where he gives her computer a virus. All of these scenes are as bad as any bad movies you ever saw. There's no redeeming value.

I especially love the scene where Eva takes Kevin out for a day for them to just talk, because it's everything bad about the movie – there's one part where they're at some outside eatery and Eva totally randomly says she hates fat people because they're just fat due to eating too much and are unhealthy for that reason. It's totally out of nowhere. Like a scriptwriter just had a bunch of hateful shit he wanted to get off his chest.

Then, at another restaurant later, Kevin shows off those college atheist philosophy reading skills again and pompously “predicts” what his mother is going to do – scold him for fucking girls and then cry because she drank too much wine. It's a carnival of dog shit writing, just terrible garbage spewing everywhere like a malfunctioning sewer. But then, that IS the movie.

Perhaps the crowning moment of awful parenting goes to John C. Reilly as the dad. After an entire movie where he has done nothing except scoff at Eva and say she's dumb for thinking Kevin is bad, he gives Kevin a fucking bow and arrow for Christmas. I can see liking his son – but for Reilly to see that dead-eyed piece of shit he fathered no doubt under the influence of alcohol, and give him a fucking weapon – that's insane to me and the biggest plothole in the film. This kid was never even close to sympathetic, even when Eva broke his arm earlier. He's been shown to be a one-dimensional evil psycho from the beginning. There's no nuance here and it's just crazy that his dad is so blind to this.

It's no surprise that the whole thing ends in a school shooting? He takes a bow and arrow to school like the only angry fucker in America to not have money to buy a gun. He isn't even the real deal – how many of these guys get their sole weapon from their fathers? I think this kid is weak as hell.

I'm making a lot of jokes here, but hey, the movie isn't taking this issue even remotely seriously. What's the message here? A bad kid will turn out bad if you parent him in a terrible way, I guess, and even that's a stretch to say there's any message at all. There's no real exploration of why he turned out that way or what we can do about it – all the movie wants to do is show shocking things for no reason. So fuck that.

Image copyright of its original owner, I don't own it.