Ewe-dunit! Talking sheep and a flock of stars make this a baa-king mad murder mystery, BRIAN VINER reviews The Sheep Detectives

The Sheep Detectives (PG, 109 mins)

Verdict: Mutton dressed as lamb

Rating: Three stars

The 2015 classic Shaun The Sheep and its 2019 sequel Farmageddon set, in the admittedly uncrowded field of ovine comedies for all the family, a formidably high baa.

The Sheep Detectives reaches it only intermittently, though along the way there are several moments of shear pleasure.

Right, with (almost) all of my sheep puns out of the way, let’s get down to business.

I took my seat expecting to be charmed, given the pedigree of those involved. Hugh Jackman and Emma Thompson lead the live-action cast, with Bryan Cranston, Patrick Stewart, Chris O’Dowd and Julia Louis-Dreyfus among the voice ensemble.

Furthermore, the director is Kyle Balda (Minions) and the writer is Craig Mazin, whose diverse credits range from The Hangover Part II to the brilliant TV mini-series Chernobyl (2019). And the producers are Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner, whose Working Title stable positively overflows with hits.

This film’s working title was Three Bags Full: A Sheep Detective Movie, which was lifted from the 2005 source novel by the German writer Leonie Swann – but perhaps also hinted at a woolly version of the Knives Out series.

I don’t know why it was re-titled, but with its wacky array of murder suspects and decidedly convoluted plot, it is more than a little reminiscent of Wake Up Dead Man, the latest Knives Out picture. With added computer-generated talking sheep.

Jackman plays George Hardy, a shepherd so devoted to his bleating charges that he gives them names (such as Ronnie and Reggie, a pair of pugnacious twin rams), feeds them blue medicine and reads detective stories to them at twilight. He thinks they can’t talk, but of course we know otherwise, and soon they have a real-life murder to discuss.

Sadly, the victim is George himself. But who has knocked him off? And why?

The setting is rural England, so there’s also a distinct whiff of Agatha Christie and Midsomer Murders – although the characters best-equipped to solve George’s murder seem to be his beloved herd, principally ‘the world’s smartest sheep’ Lily (Louis-Dreyfus) along with Mopple (O’Dowd) and Sebastian (Cranston).

On the human side of the fence, there’s a local copper played by Nicholas Braun (more or less reprising Cousin Greg, his amiable dimwit in the TV hit Succession), a dogged newspaperman (Nicholas Galitzine) and a sneaky shopkeeper (Hong Chau).

Thompson plays George’s sharp-tongued lawyer, who arrives to read out his will and reveals that he had two children, who were given up for adoption.

The film bowls along merrily enough, and the CGI sheep are splendidly rendered. There are also quite a few lines that made me smile, with Lily and co aware from all the detective stories George read them that the police habitually like to pin this kind of murder on ‘a drifter’.

Yet I’d hoped for more. By the end I felt mildly short-changed… rather than thoroughly fleeced.

 Also showing 

Charismatic Billie Eilish totally absorbed me… 

There could hardly be more of a gulf between the subjects of this week’s two major music documentaries: Billie Eilish and Iron Maiden. Will anyone go to the cinema to see both? Maybe only the odd grizzled headbanger with an adolescent granddaughter in tow, each keen to see what gives the other a buzz. But to find an unexpected and rather heartwarming connection between these two polar-opposite acts, read on.

Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard And Soft (12A, 114 mins, four out of five stars) is a concert film, shot last year in Manchester and best enjoyed in 3D. I don’t exactly fall into its target audience but I was wholly absorbed by it. The 24-year-old singer-songwriter is a remarkably charismatic performer, whose objective is to give her fans ‘sensory overload’.

This film is directed and produced by James Cameron, no less, a titanic figure himself in more ways than one. He shows us some footage before and after the Manchester extravaganza, from which it’s clear that Eilish (above, on stage with brother Finneas), so candid in both words and song about her issues with mental health and body image, puts her soul into every aspect of her shows.

But he also interviews some of her young fans, who give some sense of her social, cultural and indeed emotional significance.

One boy says that neither his parents nor therapy have done for him what Eilish has. She ‘made me realise that my mental health can and will be OK,’ a girl adds. All this is fascinating and moving, but Cameron has made a concert film first and foremost, in which Eilish holds all the thousands in the arena, every one of them seemingly holding up an iPhone, in the palms of her own two hands.

And so to Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition (15, 106 mins, three out of five stars), an adoring documentary which nevertheless reveals that what Eilish does now for Western adolescents, the heavy-metal band from east London did in the 1970s and 1980s for youngsters behind the Iron Curtain.

Actor Javier Bardem and the Kiss singer Gene Simmons are among those explaining their decades-long devotion, but it’s much more interesting listening to the Polish fans who remember ‘Maiden’ as the first band to mount full stage spectaculars under the Communist regime. The iconoclasm of their music gave hope to those oppressed by totalitarianism, which even those who might compare one of their gigs to dental surgery without anaesthetic would have to admit is a pretty cool legacy.

All films are in cinemas now; Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard And Soft only from today until Sunday.