It’s a marketer’s dream title, isn’t it: The Sheep Detectives. Straight to the point and brain-tickling. Indeed, considering the slick, straight-to-Amazon Prime aesthetic, it wouldn’t be surprising if the marketing team cooked up the title themselves. Which is to say, The Sheep Detectives is that sort of movie, and the title does describe something of the film, of course. There are sheep, and they are detectives — sort of. But, frankly, it’s much more a sheep movie than a detective movie. A better title would have been something like, say, The Mystery of the Winter Lamb, which is more fittingly sentimental and more evocative of the comfy mystery novels the movie wishes to emulate, while still hinting at the grand arc of the “winter lamb.” More impactful than the eventual denouement of the murder mystery, however, is the character development of these CGI wool-wearers, including a gradual shifting in sheep “morality.” The result is a movie that is foremost and willfully emotional; an uplifting, if slightly mind-numbing, bit of saccharine nectar. And so, like sheep, we forget whatever it is that hurts, for a few hours.
The setting of The Sheep Detectives is a pastoral English countryside reminiscent of the novels of Thomas Hardy. Hugh Jackman’s kindly, bookish, handsome, and physically gifted shepard in fact is Hardy — George Hardy. He also feels lifted straight out of the pages of Far From the Madding Crowd. In fact, Hardy and his sheep — CGI, remember — are the most authentic elements of the film, as they represent manifestations of pastoral poetry, rural imagination, romantic fantasy. But the town of Denbrook, which provides the setting for this particular whodunnit, is a completely artificial construction. No one there is who they say they are. Neon signs denote key geographical and institutional locations, including: “police station,” “butcher,” etc. In other words, production does very little to hide that this is, of course, a movie set. But we are always drawn back to the sheep, who are rendered in an impressively photorealistic manner, and animated with individual personality. Their faces are given a tasteful touch of human expressiveness that manages to largley avoid the uncanny, and our suspension of disbelief works well enough that these computerized creations stand in as simulacra in much the manner of charming talking-animal flicks of the ’90s like Homeward Bound.
Style and form, however, have little bearing on The Sheep Detectives. The primary draw for viewers — at least as intended — is a sweet, sappy emotionality, which in execution comes off as shockingly genuine, despite the artificial environs (and heroes). Performances pluck at the fundamental, universal heartstrings of low melodrama, and the sheep, brought to life via a range of talented voices, including everyone from Patrick Stewart to Regina Hall to Julie Louis-Dreyfus, possess an earnest pathos — even a believable humanity, if you will. The connection these artificial creations share with Jackman is also touching, and while most of the other human characters are given short shrift, having to perform woodenly as pawns in a strange game of Clue, Nicholas Braun and Molly Gordon are at least given moments of feeling, and carry it off reasonably well.
Director Kyle Balda, familiar enough for his work in the G-rated genre (Despicable Me 3, Minions) if not his name, is thusly more than capable of guiding us through this serene fairy tale of a movie. But what he’s lacking are the chops needed to execute a classic whodunnit. Perhaps this is splitting hairs given the family-friendly texture of the project, and who says it’s patently wrong that viewers will instead spend most of the runtime oohing and aahing over cute sheep and their emotional arcs rather than analyzing the clues ineherent to this narrative specifically and the genre at large. More impeachable is the killer’s identity, the deduction of which is classically a game of discovery and a hallmark of the genre, but it’s here left to function as a mere afterthought. Far more interesting and worthy of explanation is the question of the “winter lamb,” the quasi-humanity of this flock of sheep as its reflected within this context, and the moving journey upon which they embark. It’s not a lot, and it doesn’t fully distract from the drab mystery lazily purloined from superior far, but it just might be enough. After all, The Sheep Detectives is more Thomas Hardy than Agatha Christie.
DIRECTOR: Kyle Balda; CAST: Hugh Jackman, Nicholas Braun, Molly Gordon, Nicholas Galitzine, Emma Thompson; DISTRIBUTOR: Amazon MGM Studios; IN THEATERS: May 8; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 49 min.
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