The Sheep Detectives (2026) Review
This weekend a new family movie, The Sheep Detectives hit theaters. A movie with a very fun premise that involves Hugh Jackman getting murdered and his sheep having to figure out the mystery. This is a movie that has been getting great reviews, where it currently holds a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes. Is the movie any good? Let’s talk about it!
The Good
The first thing that came to mind leaving the theater was that this movie was absolutely delightful and charming. If you watched the trailer for this film and were charmed by the trailer and thought that it looked fun, then I think you’re going to really enjoy this movie. It’s just the type of movie that makes you feel so many things whether that’s happiness or sadness, but overall it’s a feel good movie. It’s the type of movie that you can watch and be entertained by for 90 minutes. Given we’re living in uncertain times with a lot of toxicity, these types of movies that are very unassuming are just the type of movies that we need and will keep audiences entertained. I went with some friends of mine to go see this movie, all of us were very excited to check it out. All of us left the theater really liking the film and sharing that same thought of it being a feel good movie that really worked and hit all of the right notes. It’s a film that I feel like we don’t get a lot of these days. Most of the family movies we get nowadays are animated movies, the fact that this one is live action I think adds a certain charm to it and makes it feel less stale.
Specifically, one of the best aspects about this movie would be the humor of the film. There’s so many jokes in this movie that had my audience laughing out loud from beginning to end. There’s a lot of the very big jokes that were shown in the trailer involving all of the hijinks of the sheep that are certainly highlights of the film. But there’s also very small and subtle jokes that are clever little nods that once again put a smile on your face. The film is able to have a nice variety of jokes where each of the sheep have a different personality to them, which allows for different types of jokes to happen. There’s plenty of jokes that are set up early on that have fun payoff in the third act, the prime example of this being with the two rams smashing the car. In the context of the movie, there’s more to it than just being a payoff to a joke. The comedic standout is Nicholas Braun. He’s playing this police officer that’s clearly in way over his head and doesn’t really know what to do in this situation and the fish-out-of-water comedy that comes from that is so funny, there’s so many great jokes that come from that. The film is produced by Lord & Miller, who did The LEGO Movie, the Jump Street movies with Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum, and then this year they did Project Hail Mary. All of those films are really funny and clever and this film is no exception.
Talking about the opposite of that, but the film is able to have a big heart and big emotions as you go along. We’ll talk about this later in the negative section, but the film does go in some dark directions that are off to character arcs. But the journey of the characters has a lot of emotional weight that does pack a punch. But a lot of the emotion of the film comes from the disconnect between humans and sheep. Sheep aren’t able to understand the concept of death or feel emotions the same way that humans do. That disconnect is actually one of the big reasons why the film has so much heart and emotion is because our lead characters are two different species. The film is exploring these ideas about fitting in and finding your place, or finding your flock in the case of sheep. You know you have something special when the story of the film is the exact story the characters need in order to change by the end of it. That’s when you have a good story that works and comes together and works really well.
Finally, the cast of the film is a lot of fun. The voice actors for the sheep are filled with a bunch of familiar faces that you love to see on screen (or hearing on screen). You have Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, Bryan Cranston, Chris O’Dowd, Patrick Stewart, and more that make the film fun. All of the sheep have their moment to shine so it allows for the actors to have a lot of fun with their respective roles. With the human characters, like I said Nicholas Braun as the cop is probably the stand out for me. He’s the human character that probably gets the most screentime. He’s a cop and so he’s investigating, which means that he has a good size role in the film. Hugh Jackman is the shepherd that gets killed, because of that he doesn’t have a lot of screentime. He’s very prominent in the first 10-15 minutes of the film then he disappears and shows up a few times throughout the film. Despite not having a lot of screentime, he’s able to make the most of it because Hugh Jackman is such a movie star that bring a leading man to the entire film. Likewise, Emma Thompson plays a lawyer who doesn’t have a whole lot of screentime. She has a screen presence about her that makes you notice her and pay attention to her. It’s not surprising the film’s cast is great when you have this many familiar faces.
The Bad
The big thing here is that I found a lot of the human characters to be very lackluster and not very interesting. I talked about Emma Thompson’s character being fun, but the only reason why she’s fun is because it’s Thompson who is of course an icon and has a screen presence about her. But if it wasn’t Thompson or another veteran actress who wasn't playing her, then the character wouldn’t be very interesting. There’s nothing in the script that allows her to do a whole lot. When it comes to the suspects, everybody besides Jackman, Braun, or Thompson none of them very interesting to me. That’s kind of disappointing because I feel like the fun of a murder mystery is seeing the fun characters played by fun actors. I think that’s why the Knives Out films work so well is that they get great actors to play the characters. Here, there’s really nothing in what the actors are given to make them pop or standout. The movie felt a little bit lackluster in those regards.
Also, the film can have some tone issues where it’s tackling very dark subject matter while being a family friendly adventure. I would say about 90% of this film is great family entertainment that is great for the whole family and a great movie to see Mother’s Day weekend. Then there’s about 10% of the film that’s tackling death that I think gets very dark and doesn’t fit with the rest of the movie. In the middle of the film, there’s a sequence that gets really dark and kind of violent that I could see being very off putting for families that have smaller children. There’s some very big and important thing that happens in that scene that has emotional payoff, so I think you have to keep that sequence in there but I think there was a way you could’ve trimmed around that sequence and make it play better. I think there’s a way they could’ve communicated the ideas that scene was communicating but in a totally different fashion that’s very family friendly and fits more in line with the tone of the film.
Finally, I think some of the logic of the film gets a little bit confusing and convoluted when the big reveals happen and you know what happened and who did it. In the third act the killer is revealed and almost immediately my brain was thinking about things that didn’t really make sense with the information we know and what happened earlier. I didn’t have an issue with the reveal itself, I thought it fit the movie nicely. But when you step back and look at the movie and look at what the killer did or didn’t do it doesn’t really make sense.
Final Thoughts: Overall, The Sheep Detectives was a really fun time at the movies that I think a lot of families are really going to enjoy. The film is very charming due to the story, character, humor, and even a little bit of heart and emotion thrown in there. There’s a few things that didn’t fully work that holds the movie back a little bit. But overall, I thought the film was really good and really fun.
The Score: 8.7/10 (B+)
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