![]() ![]() By day, he potters around his apiary, growls at his doctor (McKellen’s range of grunts is as wide as Timothy Spall’s Mr Turner), and supplements his diet with prickly ash, a rare plant gathered in Japan with alleged healing properties. Attended by housekeeper Mrs Munro (Laura Linney, of no fixed accent) and her young son Roger (rising star Milo Parker), the rheumy-eyed 93-year-old dithers hither and yon, his step uncertain, his face saggy and liver-spotted. The year is 1947, nearly 30 years after the troubling events which ultimately caused Sherlock to retreat to the country, and the care of his beloved bees. Now comes Sir Ian McKellen, playing Holmes as a lonely recluse, slowly succumbing to senility. More recently we’ve had Robert Downey Jr as a pugilist detective in Guy Ritchie’s punchy reboots, and Benedict Cumberbatch as a thoroughly modern Sherlock in the hit BBC TV series. John Barrymore, Raymond Massey and Clive Brook all played the detective before The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939) established Basil Rathbone as the iconic bearer of the deerstalker and pipe combo. The film’s biggest success is its evocation of Victorian London, via much location work and CG rendering: here, Ritchie’s grittily romantic view of our city comes into its own, culminating in a delicious climax on the girders of a half-built Tower Bridge.Is there a version of Sherlock Holmes we haven’t seen? Screen incarnations of Arthur Conan Doyle’s most celebrated character date back to the birth of cinema (the tricksy short Sherlock Holmes Baffled was made at the turn of the century), and Conan Doyle himself praised actor Eille Norwood’s “wonderful impersonation of Holmes” in shorts and features from the early 1920s. ![]() The banter between Holmes and Watson isn’t as witty as it should be, but the detective’s lone mutterings, especially his deductions, are fun. Ritchie’s ‘Sherlock Holmes’ is effective as a caricatured comedy adventure and shows some fidelity to Arthur Conan Doyle, especially in Downey Jr’s portrayal of the eccentric but cold-hearted Holmes. The villain hangs, but, for Holmes and Watson, this is just the start of a series of fights, rescues, escapes and revelations, all cloaked in creaky supernatural mumbo jumbo. In this early scene, Ritchie’s Holmes reveals himself as a physical titan in a witty interlude in which we witness in slow motion the microscopic details of his plan to incapacitate an assailant by brute force. They discover an aristocrat, Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong), in the middle of a ritualistic murder of a young woman. ![]() Plunging into their careers mid-flow, we watch as they confront a conspiracy of national proportions. Here, Robert Downey Jr draws on his wild-eyed side to play the detective, while Jude Law assumes the more sober clothes of his sidekick, Dr Watson. Shed of his tedious infatuation with off-the-peg London gangsters, Ritchie proves a competent teller of the fast-paced, not po-faced yarn. Guy Ritchie the director and Guy Ritchie the screenwriter part ways for this latest spin on the Sherlock Holmes story, and if separation turns into divorce it would be no bad thing, at least on the evidence of this big-hearted, atmospheric entertainment. ![]()
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