Once every 20 years, Hugh Jackman lends his considerable screen power to the summer’s friendliest murder mystery.
In the summer of 2006, Jackson channeled the ruthlessness that surely hides behind every matinee idol as the Tarot Card Killer in Woody Allen’s London-based trifle Scoop, which, despite its grisly premise, was a charmer of a comedy. Now, Jackman shifts from killer to victim in director Kyle Balda’s The Sheep Detectives, which is far less accomplished, and infinitely more infantile, than its antecedent, but which shares some of the same assumptions. These movies take it as a given that there is easygoing entertainment to be sussed out of various acts of wickedness, as long as the stars are appealing and the locales scenic. Call it the Murder, She Wrote theory of storytelling, though even here, The Sheep Detectives falls short: For starters, it’s about an hour longer than any given episode of Murder, She Wrote — and not in a good way.
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The problems with The Sheep Detectives begin with its title. If one goes to the movie in ignorance of its literary inspiration — a 2005 novel by Leonie Swann titled Three Bags Full: A Sheep Detective Story — one might assume that the title is a metaphor, just as Norm MacDonald, in a famous appearance on David Letterman’s late-night show, claimed to have once assumed the Broadway musical Cats could not possibly be about actual cats. In fact, as with Cats, The Sheep Detectives is about the domesticated animal so named, which, in this film’s universe, is capable of human speech and Sherlock Holmes-like powers of detection.
Jackman stars as George Hardy, a shepherd with ample acreage on the outskirts of an allegedly decrepit British village that is nonetheless prosperous enough to support an inn and a cultural festival. Yet it is not such narrative inconsistencies that disturb as much as the fact that, for the first 20 or so minutes of the movie, Jackman is required to co-star primarily with a flock of sheep. The notion would be insipid even if the sheep had been portrayed by real animals, but the fact that they are CGI representations of their species makes the spectacle pitiful. Because the film exists in the no-man’s-land of adult whimsy — it is certainly not intended for children, although it may be perfect for what no less an authority than Dr. Seuss once termed “obsolete children” — our minds freely wander from the action on-screen: We wonder, watching Jackman feed a bottle of milk to a little lamb and whisper in its ear, what prop he might have been holding before the computer wizards drew in the adorable creature?
It is not enough, by the film’s lights, for George to be a good and faithful shepherd — a perfectly noble profession — but he also must nearly flirt with pagan nature worship. He insists upon giving human names to each sheep, though the names he picks have a cloying cuteness that suggests a man of limited imagination: among their ranks are Lily, Zora, Sebastian, and, heaven help us, Mopple. George speaks of his sheep with a reverence generally reserved for deities, and he is presented as hostile toward the local church and its minister, which offers a clue as to the movie’s surprisingly strident agenda: Much of the film is devoted to the sheep accepting the fact that, upon their deaths, they will not transform into clouds, as their theology insists, and will, in fact, merely be dead. They learn to accept that they will live on — as the modern cliche goes — only in the memories of those who loved them, ruminants and humans alike. For such a mawkish movie, The Sheep Detectives seems committed to pushing a thoroughly atheistic vision of life, at least as far as orthodox belief systems are concerned.
In any event, among the weirder manifestations of George’s sheep worship is his nightly practice of summoning his flock to listen to him read from his collection of mystery and crime novels. The sheep merely “baaa” while George is reading, although, when outside of the presence of their shepherd and other humans, they converse among themselves about the finer points of the plots. “It was the creepy aunt,” says one sheep about the likely suspect in one mystery novel. “The creepy aunt was three stories ago,” replies another.
Then George turns up lifeless in his pasture, the likely victim of a murder. Alas, George has acquired enemies among the townsfolk, which include jealous innkeeper Beth Pennock (Hong Chau), rival shepherd Caleb Merrow (Tosin Cole), and stony-hearted, evidently irredeemably evil butcher Ham Gilyard (Conleth Hill), the last of whom is subject to particular vilification (Among other things, The Sheep Detectives is a very pro-vegetarian, carnivore-hostile movie). All of this is tracked by a reporter from a nearby newspaper, Elliot Matthews (Nicholas Galitzine), whose motives may not be entirely journalistic. Ironically, when the film sticks to human-based scenes revolving around George’s murder and its fallout, it manages to be relatively engaging in the Scoop manner. Light-hearted whodunits, as we know, can be hard to resist.
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But, please, resist this one. Since the story demands that the sheep — the sheep! — play an active role in sleuthing, the investigation into George’s death is instantly trivialized. This is too much. Having been asked to accept that sheep can reason and verbalize, we are further asked to accept that, through their exposure to Agatha Christie, they can think through true-crime cases. Are we to take seriously the scene of a lamb — yes, a lamb — being hoisted into a jail to point an incompetent police officer (Nicholas Braun, faintly amusing) in the right direction? Most audiences will check out by the point at which they realize the extent to which the movie’s title was truthful: that it really, truly will be about sheep engaging in detective work.
Since the movie has nothing on its mind but reminding us of the unceasing adorableness and underrated smarts of sheep (and bizarrely insisting on the purported untruth of religious systems), we might at least hope that the performances are solid. Unfortunately, Jackman struggles to find much to do when playing scenes against the sheep or their on-set stand-ins. As a follow-up to his terrifically layered and touching performance as a Neil Diamond tribute band performer in Song Sung Blue, this is a complete disappointment. As for those who lend their voices to the sheep — including Bryan Cranston, Regina Hall, and, most notably but inexplicably, Seinfeld alum Julia Louis-Dreyfus as chief sheep Lily — they over-perform and over-enunciate in the manner of far too many vocal actors these days. Friendliness is a virtue in these strange times, but not when it involves having so much wool pulled over the audience’s eyes.
Peter Tonguette is the Life & Arts editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
