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Rating:  - The Game is afoot!
Young Sherlock Holmes got a rough ride when it came out - not so much for the notion of Holmes and Watson meeting as children (there'd been a more straight-laced British childrens' TV series about just that a few years earlier that passed without any noticeable outrage) but because it was felt that it owed far more to executive producer than Steven Spielberg than Arthur Conan Doyle. The fact that after it opened to mediocre business Stateside it was retitled Young Sherlock Holmes and the Pyramid of Fear to add an Indiana Jones spin to the marketing only added to their impression. Egyptian cults in the heart of London committing human sacrifices, hallucinogenic drugs leading to fatal encounters with turkey dinners and stained-glass windows, flying machines and, worse still, a girl was hardly the stuff of The Strand Magazine's most famous creation. But Doyle himself might have been a bit more forgiving - after all, he had Holmes come up against demon dogs, vengeful Mormons, deadly pygmies and even a vampire, and wasn't adverse to penning tales about vampires and monsters on the side when not attending séances or declaring children's photographs of fairies to be genuine proof of ethereal beings. In many ways the screenwriters have been rather more sympathetic to his creations and their world than they were ever given credit for, speculating on the origins of Holmes' strained relationship with Inspector Lestrade, his reticence with the opposite sex and even his vicious feud with Moriarty (you'll have to stick around for the post-end credits coda for that). And while critics complained that the film was special effects heavy, with his love of camera trickery it's affair bet whatever else he thought of the film, he'd have been delighted by the groundbreaking early CGI effects, which still manage to impress without overwhelming the film (the 2-D stained glass knight in armour is particularly cleverly designed)
Nicholas Rowe is an entirely convincing young Holmes, with an air of natural superiority without being unlikeable, and for the most part Alan Cox (rather unflatteringly used by his father Brian as the model for his turn as Hannibal Lektor!) avoids turning Watson into a clown, while a young Sophie Ward is a very fetching female lead and Anthony Higgins a dashing mentor-figure. The story is enjoyable even if it veers into adventure more than detection by the end, climaxing with a fine swordfight on a thin ice on a frozen river Thames. Not everything is entirely successful - there's a nightmare sequence with some pastries that really should have stayed on the cutting room floor - but the film's much more enjoyable than it has any right to be. It's also beautifully designed with a rather splendid score by Bruce Broughton that ensures it sounds as good as it looks. Great fun.
Rating: - Action, adventure, suspense -- not a kid's movie.
I remember seeing this movie a looong time ago when it first came out. I think I actually appreciate and enjoy it more now than I did back when.
Do not be confused -- this isn't a kid's movie per-se. There are some rather scary parts to this movie, and there is a good deal of violence, though none of it is what I would call overly graphic.
The acting is well done, the settings are quaint and fit the storyline well, and when you combine that with a great musical score and a rather intriguing plot, you have what I consider to be a FANTASTIC movie.
Rating: - Young Sherlock Holmes
I've always wanted a copy of this movie after seeing it in a theatre in the 80s. Although it strays from the canon by Sir A. Conan Doyle, it is done so with respect. The story is engaging, and the special effects are wonderfully done. This is one that a person with even the slightest interest in Sherlock Holmes will enjoy.
Rating:  - Flawed Directing Ruins Drama
Since Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson meet each other for the first time as adults in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Sign of the Four", the story in this movie is distinctly extra-canonical. And yet, aside from that one minor continuity glitch, everything else in this movie lines up very well with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories. If the first few chapters of "The Sign of the Four" can be temporarily forgotten (or ret-conned, as us comic book fans say) the story in the movie not only works well with the rest of Sherlock Holmes continuity, but helps to explain a lot of things Conan Doyle never got around to explaining, such as the origin of Holmes's distinctive deer-stalker cap, coat, and pipe, the beginnings of Holmes's relationship with Inspector Lestrade, the origins of Moriarity and his rivalry with Holmes, and finally the reason Holmes has maintained a distance from women all his adult life.
This last reason, the death of a true love, turns out to be remarkably similar to the reason Ian Fleming gives for James Bond inability to stay monogamous, but since Ian Fleming was inspired by the Fu-Manchu series, which in turn was inspired by Sherlock Holmes, I suppose its not altogether inappropriate that the characters share this link.
The story in this movie, about an Egyptian cult of the dead in an underground temple, is at points very similar to "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom", particularly a scene with a human sacrifice, lots of chanting, and the young heroes looking on horrified from their hiding place. I'm going to have to double check the dates, but I suspect this movie came out after "Temple of Doom" and was trying to cash in on the Indiana Jones adventure craze.
Again, this is not entirely inappropriate, since Indiana Jones was based partly on the adventure movies of the 30s, which in turn were based off of stories like "Sherlock Holmes" and "Fu-Manchu". In fact the real sin is not that they attempted to rip Indiana Jones off, but that they failed so horribly in doing so.
Which brings me to the flaws of this film...
I'm told this film has been criticized because the story involves Holmes and Watson more or less stumbling onto the bad guys, instead of using Holmes characteristic deductive reasoning. However some of Conan Doyle's original stories also follow this pattern, so I don't hold that against the film. Also in the movie, like Conan Doyle's stories, Holmes does not share all of his information with Watson at the time, but only once the case is all over does he reveal how he solved it.
Unfortunately in the movie the viewer gets to see some of the assassinations in the film, and thus has more information than Holmes does, which is unfortunate and takes away from the suspense a little bit. Also the victims are shot with a poison dart which causes them to hallucinate, and (again unfortunately) we the viewer have to sit through these hallucinations, which I suspect were just an excuse to cram some Hollywood special effects into this movie and make it more marketable.
Really, sometimes you have to wonder what in the world Hollywood is thinking. I don't know a single person who likes those weird dream/ Hallucination sequences (unless watching them while high), and yet Hollywood films are often full of them.
Also the directing in this film is terrible. None of the action sequences are choreographed with any sort of suspense, and most of the physical action in this movie doesn't make any sense at all. Examples:
- --the heroine is abducted by the bad guy, and she appears to run off with him without making any effort to resist whatsoever.
- --The bad guys with swords are the clumsiest bad guys ever, and can't seem to hit Holmes or Watson, even though the latter two are making what look like only lazy efforts to get away.
- --A character gets knocked into the ice water, and sinks way too quickly.
---A crash landing, which should have been a dramatic sequence, is almost boring. I could go on and on.
Verdict: Worth watching for Sherlock Holmes fans or 80s nostalgia, but there are good reasons why this film never became a classic.
Rating: - Far fetched story line
I have realized that every spin off of Sherlock Holmes disappoints me greatly (I am an ardent fan of the BBC series with Jeremy Brett as Holmes).
I do not intend to spoil the plot and hence I shall write no more about the mystery.
On the bright side, they have tried hard to do justice to Sherlock Holmes whimpsies, e.g, fencing, the hat, existence of Mycroft et al.
This one simply adds to my big fat collection of Sherlock Holmes DVDs. I wont dispose of it, but I wont be watching it for the second time either.
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