Despite raves for their previous teamings in “Talladega Nights” and “Step Brothers,” the pairing of Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly in the just opened period comedy “Holmes and Watson” has sunk like a lead balloon.

Not screened for press, the first reviews for it have gone online and it holds the ignominious honor of a 0% score and 2/10 average rating on Rotten Tomatoes. On Metacritic it’s not much better with a 20/100 score. Both are amongst the lowest scores for any film released this year.

Reviews are unrelentingly savage, such as THR which starts with the line “you can feel the flop sweat emanating” and followed shortly by the phrase “devastatingly unfunny”. Other reviews echo the same sentiment – the film wastes talent in a completely unfunny film which utterly misfires. It has also been labelled the worst films about Holmes made to date.

The $42 million project marked a re-teaming of Ferrell with director Etan Cohen with whom he worked on “Get Hard,” another comedy criticised for its terrible humor. Coen received acclaim for his scripting work on the likes of “Idiocracy,” “Tropic Thunder” and “Men in Black 3” but his directing work hasn’t gone so well.

“Holmes and Watson” is in theaters now.