62/100
Just an okay mystery—I half-guessed whodunnit fairly early (rot13: crttrq vg nf gur oebgure va Fbhgu Nsevpn, qvq abg thrff gung jnf gur ercbegre)—but the comic conceit of sheep struggling to convey the results of their sleuthing to a bumbling dimwitted bobby who's essentially British Cousin Greg proved to be robust enough that I didn't really need a climactic surprise solution. Balda's résumé is Minions-heavy and there are a couple of superfluous ram-bunctious (get it?) sequences here that seem expressly meant to keep little kids from wandering into the aisle; Craig Mazin* wrote the screenplay, though, and while it appears that he radically revamped Three Bags Full (unread by me), a gentle droll wit still predominates. And I quite liked the Inside Out-esque theme of unhappy memories as fundamentally inextricable from happy memories. When Mopple is revealed early on as the only sheep incapable of deliberate selective forgetfulness (functioning more like a self-applied variant on the Men in Black neuralyzer), I immediately assumed that the mystery would ultimately be solved by his remembering some crucial clue that the entire flock had repressed so as not to get bummed out; still consider that a missed opportunity, but the unexpected direction this element took was nonetheless welcome. Less enamored of the very familiar runt-makes-good stuff, though having the rejection hinge on a meaningless accident of birth is fairly savvy, might get smarter children wondering why we care so idiotically much about how close to the equator people's distant ancestors happened to live. Not sure why "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" recurs over the course of this decidedly not-Scottish movie—I guess that's now the UK equivalent of "All Star."
* Full unnecessary disclosure: I played poker with Mazin a few times maybe 15 years ago, in an irregular game at Rian Johnson's house. Didn't really get to know him, but just for the record. Never came up before because I skipped all of the previous ten movies he wrote and/or directed, though I've seen Chernobyl and The Last of Us.