Johnny Depp has starred in plenty of great movies, but a forgotten animated film from the 2010s that just hit Paramount+ isn’t one of them. Released in 2018, just a year after Depp appeared in his final Pirates of the Caribbean film, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, the movie became the actor’s ninth lowest-rated film and flopped at the box office with just a $90.5 million worldwide gross against a production budget of $59 million. Unsurprisingly, the movie has been forgotten amid Depp’s other great releases, like What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? and Edward Scissorhands.
The movie in question is Sherlock Gnomes, the 2018 sequel to Gnomeo & Juliet, and it’s been streaming on Paramount+ since November 1st with little notice. The movie is an unusual animated retelling of the Sherlock Holmes stories, with Depp voicing the gnome version of the character, who is recruited by Gnomeo and Juliet to solve a series of gnome disappearances in modern-day London. James McAvoy, Emily Blunt, Maggie Smith, Michael Caine, Ashley Jensen, Matt Lucas, Stephen Merchant, and Ozzy Osbourne reprise their roles from the first film.
Sherlock Gnomes Is Just as Bad as You Remember
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Sherlock Gnomes may be better off left as a forgotten movie, because it has few, if any, redeeming qualities. The film was critically panned upon its release as “a dull and pointless sequel” that “ends up solving little except how to lose an audience’s attention.” The film only earned a 28% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes to become one of the lowest-rated movies in both Depp and Blunt’s careers, and it really hasn’t aged any better with time.
Released seven years after Gnomeo & Juliet, Sherlock Gnomes failed to justify its existence and really just became a forgettable and underwhelming sequel. The movie centered itself on an all-too predictable mystery and generally weak plot where the gnome puns were too frequent and the Sherlock Holmes parodies were poorly executed and failed to land with either kids or adults. Even the characters were hard to like, with Depp’s titular character annoying and self-absorbed, and others were entirely pushed to the sidelines, the movie mostly wasting the potential of its great voice cast.
Sherlock Gnomes, which did slightly improve upon the animation quality of the first, was ultimately a subpar sequel that didn’t land with the majority of viewers, and it’s generally just a pretty boring film.
What’s New on Paramount+?
Sherlock Gnomes isn’t the only movie freshly streaming on Paramount+. The streamer added plenty of movies to its streaming library this November. Subscribers looking for a film for movie night can now stream the likes of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Get Rich or Die Tryin’, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, and Titanic, as well as films from the Indiana Jones, Tomb Raider, and Talladega Nights film series.
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