Whenever anybody talks about Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly everybody starts raving about how great Step Brothers and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby are. Well, right off the bat I can tell you that Holmes & Watson is absolute trash. This supposed comedic take on Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson failed to elicit a single laugh from the entire theatre (which happened to be just me; nobody else had purchased a ticket to the only screening that day). There is so much wrong with the film that is very difficult to determine the best place to start.
The film claims to show the funny side of Sherlock Holmes, but the character has been replaced with a complete imbecile. The humour is so low brow that it exaggerates the differences between English dry wit and American physical humour to the point that you are effectively beating a dead horse. It comes up with maybe four jokes that fail to land, and then stretches them out for as long as possible, and worse still, makes them a recurring joke. A lot of the humour would be classed as humour that would not age well (if it was even funny to begin with); instead of being a satirical look at the Victorian era, it parodies modern behaviours in Victorian times, showing how pay-per-views, selfies, booty calls, and dick pics could have been done back then. Riveting... Again, all skits are dragged out to a good five-minutes apiece. The other half of the jokes are political jokes specifically targeting the Trump Administration (going so far as to actually say "Trump").
Perhaps the best part of the movie was in the climax of the film when it decided to become a musical number for some reason. While the lyrical content might have been written by a 5-year-old, Reilly and Ferrell did come up with some lovely vocal harmonies (if it was even them that were singing). This ties in with another horrible aspect of the film; the dubbing. Absolutely atrocious. Out of sync for much of the film with background noises cutting in and out, it felt like they ran out of time and money to do it properly (or perhaps they realised the film was no good and didn't want to waste time on it).
The plot is basically non-existent. Ralph Fiennes portrayal as James Moriarty was practically non-existent, Hugh Laurie's dialogue? Practically non-existent, and comedic value? Non-existent. If it weren't for the fact that I was writing a review, I would have walked out of the film after the first 10 minutes. Paying $18 to sit alone in a room for an hour and a half without laughing once. It's like they purposefully tried to make something that could get a lower Rotten Tomatoes score than a modern Adam Sandler film.
An absolute travesty of a film, I enjoyed no part of it; thankfully, it was only 90 minutes. This is humour that would only appeal to an audience of primary school children, but the violence, offensive language and sexual references give the film an R13 rating. Perhaps that is why the theatre was empty. The only people that would enjoy it, are too young to know who Sherlock Holmes is, and can't get a ticket even if they did.
Do not see this film. Simple as that. It's not a film so bad that it's funny. It's a film so poorly written and so poorly made that it is actually offensive to watch. Avoid Holmes & Watson like the plague.