Here\u2019s the rub. Working Title, the giant British movie brand, the inheritor of Ealing Studios and the Rank Organisation, doesn\u2019t make bad movies. But, these days, the company that gave us everything from\u00a0My Beautiful Laundrette\u00a0to\u00a0Four Weddings and a Funeral and\u00a0Bridget Jones, doesn\u2019t necessarily make good ones either. Take this latest effort: an efficient, machine-tooled \u201cfamily comedy\u201d that plays like a fascinating case study in everything that\u2019s flaccid and creatively compromised with this once venerable film house.<\/p>\n
On the surface it\u2019s 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\u2019s beloved and entirely computer-generated flock into launching their criminal investigation.<\/p>\n
The ovine voice cast includes Bryan Cranston<\/a> 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\u00a0Succession\u00a0as a clueless copper and Emma Thompson as a fearsome, Miranda Priestly<\/a>-lite, lawyer, Lydia Harbottle.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Almost immediately, however, from a script by Craig Mazin (TV\u2019s Chernobyl and The Hangover Part III) and Technicolor direction from\u00a0Minions\u00a0film-maker Kyle Balda, the film begins to dissolve into a tepid puddle of cultural anonymity. It\u2019s a co-production with Amazon and so it boasts that horrible \u201cglobalist\u201d sheen, and the depressing sense that this is a product, or \u201cfilmed content\u201d, that\u2019s been primarily designed to unfold, like perfunctory software, on laptops in Beijing, Boston and Bradford.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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\u00a0Babe, part\u00a0Thursday Murder Club<\/a>, is taking place in generic Americanised nowheresville, in the county of no-shire, in no-land.\u00a0<\/p>\n What\u2019s even more strange is that the source novel,\u00a0Three Bags Full, from 2005, is an Irish yarn (written by a German, Leonie Swann), that\u2019s 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? <\/p>\n Not every British film has to be an excoriating analysis of national identity, such as Mark Jenkin\u2019s recent and brilliant\u00a0Rose of Nevada<\/a>.\u00a0But, equally, does\u00a0The Sheep Detectives\u00a0have to bow so cravenly to a crass and confused concept of commercial appeal? Or maybe it\u2019s the curse of success, and the fault of all those worldwide Working Title hits, including\u00a0Bridget Jones\u00a0and\u00a0Johnny English, that has pointed the dial outwards, and away from the heart?<\/p>\n 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\u2019 award-winning\u00a0Chicken Run.\u00a0Again, just to drive home a point, that\u2019s a film deeply and exquisitely rooted in questions of national identity, history and culture, and all the better for it. <\/p>\n It doesn\u2019t help, of course, that the sheep are fully CGI. It\u2019s brutal to watch Hugh Jackman pretending to stroke a living creature that clearly isn\u2019t there. Yes, yes, Babe\u00a0did it too, but those creatures only had computerised mouths. The rest of the animal was real or a physical puppet. <\/p>\n 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\u00a0Star Wars, but on all fours). Crucially, in the age of an allegedly imminent AI takeover of cinema<\/a>, this celebration of synthetic life and synthetic feelings seems to have misread the room. Two-for-one cinema tickets at Everyman<\/p>\n
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PG, 109min
In cinemas from May 8<\/p>\n