As soon as I saw the trailer for this, with Hugh Jackman as a shepherd reading to sheep, and the sheep hanging for the next chapter, I knew I wanted to see it. Which is always a problem, can it then live up to the hype?
I herded up my sister and Ms 17 and Ms 10, not sure who was most excited to see it.
Hugh Jackman is George Hardy, a shepherd caring for his flock in a little English country village. George has named all of his sheep and knows all of their quirks. Lily is the smartest of them all (voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus). Yes, Julia Louis-Dreyfus is a sheep!
This is a seriously star-studded cast – Patrick Stewart, Emma Thompson, Hugh Jackman, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Bryan Cranston, Chris O’Dowd, Bella Ramsey… and the list goes on. There are some movies that with the more stars, the less the quality of the story, and more likeliness of it bombing. This is not one of these movies.
George reads stories to his flock every night, usually murder mysteries, and the sheep love it, but are driven mad when George stops for the night on a cliffhanger moment. The sheep all love to gather round and have a chat, trying to work out whodunnit. Every time, Lily works out who the killer is, and the other sheep are in awe. There’s Mopple, who doesn’t forget anything, Ronnie and Reggie, twin rams who like bashing things, Cloud, who is beautiful like a cloud, Sir Ritchfield, the elder statesman, Sebastian the loner, Wool-Eyes, who can’t see through his fringe, and the winter lamb, who nobody talks to, because, well, he’s a winter lamb not a spring lamb, and everyone knows they are to be shunned.
One day, George doesn’t come out to feed them, and the sheep find him dead. (I did cry a bit watching the sheep trying to come to terms with their shepherd being dead, but the kids were fine, funnily enough!) The bumbling police officer, the only one in the village, thinks it was natural causes, but Lily knows better. There are 2 glasses in George’s caravan, so who was with him?
Lily then decides, with help from the flock, that she needs to solve this for George – which includes crossing the road and leaving the paddock.
From then on, this is a fabulous murder mystery along the lines of Agatha Christie or Knives Out, with all of the usual village characters – the bumbling police officer, the neighbouring shepherd, the butcher, the reverend, a journalist from the city, the lawyer, and George’s long lost daughter.
There’s great music throughout and I reckon the soundtrack looks a belter of an album – Psycho Killer by Talking Heads, One Way or Another by Blondie, Bad Guy by Billie Eilish, House of the Rising Sun by The Animals, to name a few.
If I had to be picky, the only slight issue was the mixture of accents, from Australian to English to American. Still, probably better to have a mixture of accents than gratingly bad attempts.
As it’s a murder and detective story, there are mentions of death of people and animals, so it’s probably better for older kids and adults, though there were plenty of kids there that enjoyed it. There are also discussions of butchery, though not overtly shown, but there is the butcher who sharpens his knives and boxes of meat are shown with sheep pictures on them.
Ms 10’s favourite characters were Reggie and Ronnie, and she laughed her head off at them bashing each other and anything else they could find. I loved Emma Thompson as the glitzy lawyer, seriously uninterested in anything other than her own interests.
To state the bleatingly obvious, we all loved it! Yes, it’s a shear winner!
Unbaaaaleivable fun!
Reviewed by Michelle Baylis
Rating 4.5 out 5
Distributor: Amazon MGM Studios
Unbaaaaleivable fun!
