Here’s the rub. Working Title, the giant British movie brand, the inheritor of Ealing Studios and the Rank Organisation, doesn’t make bad movies. But, these days, the company that gave us everything from My Beautiful Laundrette to Four Weddings and a Funeral and Bridget Jones, doesn’t necessarily make good ones either. Take this latest effort: an efficient, machine-tooled “family comedy” that plays like a fascinating case study in everything that’s flaccid and creatively compromised with this once venerable film house.
On the surface it’s all delightful Little England wackiness a-go-go, as the first act murder of a kindly shepherd called George (Hugh Jackman) in the grassy village of Denbrook (a vivid green composite of rural Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Teletubbyland), provokes George’s beloved and entirely computer-generated flock into launching their criminal investigation.
The ovine voice cast includes Bryan Cranston as a black Icelandic alpha called Sebastian and Julia Louis-Dreyfus as an anxious Shetland called Lily. The Denbrookian humans are led by Nicholas Braun from Succession as a clueless copper and Emma Thompson as a fearsome, Miranda Priestly-lite, lawyer, Lydia Harbottle.
Almost immediately, however, from a script by Craig Mazin (TV’s Chernobyl and The Hangover Part III) and Technicolor direction from Minions film-maker Kyle Balda, the film begins to dissolve into a tepid puddle of cultural anonymity. It’s a co-production with Amazon and so it boasts that horrible “globalist” sheen, and the depressing sense that this is a product, or “filmed content”, that’s been primarily designed to unfold, like perfunctory software, on laptops in Beijing, Boston and Bradford.
George lives, on his pixelated Hertfordshire farm, in an iconic American Airstream trailer. The English farmers around him drive US-style pick-up trucks. And the Yank accents of the sheep protagonists only fuel the very deliberate sense that this murder mystery, part Babe, part Thursday Murder Club, is taking place in generic Americanised nowheresville, in the county of no-shire, in no-land.
What’s even more strange is that the source novel, Three Bags Full, from 2005, is an Irish yarn (written by a German, Leonie Swann), that’s positively immersed in local detail, and buckets of Guinness and priests and alcoholism and excess Catholicism. Why does transferring the setting to England mean that everything has to suddenly become mid-Atlantic and naffly Hollywood?
Not every British film has to be an excoriating analysis of national identity, such as Mark Jenkin’s recent and brilliant Rose of Nevada. But, equally, does The Sheep Detectives have to bow so cravenly to a crass and confused concept of commercial appeal? Or maybe it’s the curse of success, and the fault of all those worldwide Working Title hits, including Bridget Jones and Johnny English, that has pointed the dial outwards, and away from the heart?
Meanwhile, back in middlebrow bland-land, while the murder investigation continues and the often conflicted relationships between the sheep are explored, the touchstone that resonates most is Aardman Animations’ award-winning Chicken Run. Again, just to drive home a point, that’s a film deeply and exquisitely rooted in questions of national identity, history and culture, and all the better for it.
It doesn’t help, of course, that the sheep are fully CGI. It’s brutal to watch Hugh Jackman pretending to stroke a living creature that clearly isn’t there. Yes, yes, Babe did it too, but those creatures only had computerised mouths. The rest of the animal was real or a physical puppet.
And no matter how many witty lines (there are a few) are placed into the mouths of post-production beasties, they never seem real, nor do they interact credibly with their human co-stars (think Jar Jar Binks from Star Wars, but on all fours). Crucially, in the age of an allegedly imminent AI takeover of cinema, this celebration of synthetic life and synthetic feelings seems to have misread the room.
★★☆☆☆
PG, 109min
In cinemas from May 8
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