Original

Rating: 8/10 (28 February 2014)

I have always been a great Sherlock Holmes fan. I grew up on Basil Rathbone and later Jeremy Brett. This version is so original in so many ways. I think it is the best ever. First the sets. You get to walk down street after street in 19th century London, streets packed with people and horses. You get to wander about in building after building. You get to travel up and down the Thames river. You get to cross the bridges. It gives the feeling of being a tourist wandering at random in a time warp. It is such a feast for the eyes. There is no stinting ever. Holmes and Watson and young and combative. They complain about each other. Watson is not the traditional all-suffering. He is feisty. There is quite a bit of physical fighting, a bit too much for my taste. However, to make it interesting, they invented a new fighting style, vaguely reminiscent of kung foo, and a whole new way to photograph it. The movie plays with the supernatural. The villain appears to have supernatural powers. You see different degrees of skepticism. You find yourself wondering how they can possibly explain everything without the supernatural. It is all explained at the end, Agatha Christie style. The plot whips along at breakneck pace. It quite hard to keep up trying figure out who is doing what and why. The villain gets his just deserts with unusually poetic justice.