Anybody Holmes?

Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock Holmes is one of my favourite fictional characters of all time. I own all the Doyle stories, and every episode and TV movie of the Jeremy Brett British series. To me that is the series that best tells the stories of Holmes. That show was super accurate and the most accurate of any Holmes movies I have seen or heard of.

That being said, I am open to re-interpretations of the character, such as in Without a Clue – a comedy where Holmes (played by Michael Caine) is a fool and Watson (Ben Kingsley) is the smart one. So a bit of change is ok.

The change here isn’t really in Holmes or in character. All the Holmes universe characters are present or mentioned in this film, including Mycroft, Holmes’ much smarter (but lazy) brother, Inspector Lastrade and even Miss Hudson. And for the most part they are portrayed accurately. Holmes is a bit more rude then he normally is, and a bit more eccentric, but he was all that in the original stories. The setting is the same and the Watson-Holmes relationship is good too.

The only changes was making everything hyper-real – meaning that Holmes can now fight like Bruce Lee – in the books he could fight, but not to this degree, and as I mentioned above he is much ruder in this than the books, but he’s rude in the books too. Anyway I really enjoyed this movie.

The scenery characters, and music were great. I loved watching Holmes and Watson just walk around solving stuff. That was really great! This is the beginning of a great series. However, the one negative point is the lack of mystery.

You cannot ruin this movie by giving away the mystery, because there wasn’t one. Lord Blackwood is the villain. He comes back to life (we know its not magic) and then becomes a villain again which is what he always was. There was nothing solve. We (the audience) know its Blackwood, so does Holmes…so there wasn’t anything shocking in the end. We did get to see Holmes explain how he did all his magic, but that is not a mystery…we know its not real magic. Most of Doyle stories have a big plot at the end, Blackwood has a plot, but its one of those “ill take over the world plots” of a James Bond film (this was more like James Bond – but with Holmes).

Anyway, I recommend this for Holmes fans and new people who wanna get into it.

Fun movie.

4/5

J-Man.