Review of Young Sherlock Holmes (1985) by Edith N — 29 Aug 2010

What's With the Cultists?

I have not, as I have admitted before, read a lot of Sherlock Holmes in recent years. I'm pretty well done with that. However, I really do think the idea of evil cultists of Osiris as something Sherlock Holmes would, you know, ever actually encounter is a little improbable. It feels as though they wanted an action-adventure movie for kids, and they wanted a recognizable name on it. Since the heroes are all children, however, and children whose names are real draws are generally pretty scarce, they stuck the name "Sherlock Holmes" on it in the hopes that people would connect it with literature. Which yes, arguably, is what they did last year. And on further reflection, the differences are actually depressingly slight. For all that, though, it feels as if Guy Ritchie took a good, long look at this movie and worked out all the things they did wrong, making corrections as need be.

Young John Watson (Alan Cox) was going to a small boys' school until it went bankrupt. Somehow. Anyway, he ends up in another one in London, where he bunks next to one Sherlock Holmes (Nicholas Rowe). There is also, as is wont to happen, a crazy old retired professor, Waxflatter (Nigel Stock). He has, is wont to happen, a pretty niece with a better name, Elizabeth Hardy (Sophie Ward). Old men are supposedly killing themselves in seemingly ordinary ways like running screaming out of churches to throw themselves under carriages. Holmes insists to one Lestrade (Roger Ashton-Griffiths) of Scotland Yard that these are murders, but of course no one believes him. And then Waxflatter is one of the men killed, and Holmes is framed and then kicked out of school, and there are crazy Egyptian cultists embalming pretty young English girls alive. Like you do.

Now, it is worth noting that they're said to be considered a heretical sect by other Egyptians, though that does seem to be what they said of the Thuggee in [i]Temple of Doom[/i]. However, a lot of what happens doesn't make sense based on my admittedly limited knowledge of Egyptian religion. I mean, for one thing, the whole embalmed alive thing? By the age of the Pyramids, which are explicitly referenced, the Egyptians had worked out that the body preserves better if you remove the squishy bits first. I don't know what that boiling, glutinous, drippy stuff was, but it has nothing to do with how actual mummification happened. While, with [i]Temple of Doom[/i], I brush it off as "boys' adventure novel," this is in theory Sherlock Holmes, more about the deduction than the suspense. Oh, yes, there's adventure in the Holmes stories, but not enough to justify the ludicrous nature of things.

It seems, by the end, that they're basically solving the mystery by tripping over things. In one case, they literally fall into the next step in the case. While I have always believed it's what Sherlock Holmes does anyway, at least the real Sherlock Holmes makes it look like there's some thought involved. The literal falling thing is just pathetic. There are a lot of references thrown in for the sake of making Sherlock Holmes references, and most of them aren't things from the books. They're things from our pop culture image of the character. An argument can be made that, given the pastiche nature of the movie, there's nothing wrong with that. It's even a decent argument. I guess my problem is how arch the thing is. I do keep saying that nudging your audience in the ribs is not the way to accomplish an intelligent response. I can do without, and I think most people can. It's why this film is never going to be a classic.

Oh, it's a pretty enough movie, at least in places. One of the hallucinatory sequences, when a knight and dragon come to life out of a stained glass window, is the first fully-CGI sequence in a major motion picture. John Lasseter directed, as it happens, before the whole thing got transfered into the newly-created Pixar. The boy playing Holmes is kind of cute, the girl playing Elizabeth is blandly pretty, and the teacher, Professor Rathe (Anthony Higgins), looks vaguely like Hugh Jackman. Or slightly more than vaguely. It's not something I'd necessarily watch with any degree of regularity left to my own devices, but at the same time, it isn't a bad movie to watch when it's too hot to think. It's not as though you'll be doing much thinking as you watch it anyway.