It should have been so much funnier.

After someone is obviously meant to be Henry Kissinger (played by Ron Moody) is assassinated when he loses his diary and extends the wrong greeting to a welcoming party in the Middle East, someone claiming to be a direct descendant of the infamous Prof. Moriarty sends a letter to the U.S. President (Joss Ackland) taking responsibility and claiming that it’s the first step in a plan to control the world.

Who better to stop the descendant of Moriarty than the descendant of Moriarty’s greatest enemy?  Arthur Sherlock Holmes (John Cleese) operates out of Baker Street with Dr. Watson (Arthur Lowe), who is bionic, and their housekeeper, Miss Hudson (Connie Booth).  Holmes solution to bringing out Moriarty is to host a gathering of the world’s greatest detectives and to dare Moriarty to try to take them out with one fell swoop.  Soon, everyone from Sam Spade to Columbo to McCloud is showing up at Baker Street.

This is a joke-a-minute comedy.  The jokes that work are funny but, unfortunately, there aren’t many of them.  Some bits, like Joss Ackland’s impersonation of Gerald Ford, start off well and then go on for too long.  Other bits, like the famous TV detectives showing up at Baker Street, have potential but fail due to poor execution.  Unfortunately, much of the humor is just not that clever to begin with, which is not something that anyone would expect from a script co-written by John Cleese.  As an actor, John Cleese is funny but underused, playing Sherlock Holmes as being an even denser version of Basil Fawlty.  Arthur Lowe’s comedic befuddlement is consistently amusing but I wish the script has done more with the idea of him being bionic.  Connie Booth is both funny and sexy and the best reason to watch this misfire.