Given what retirement looks like, Holmes might have been better off ending it all with a trip over the Reichenbach Falls, as Doyle once intended.

Munro (Laura Linney) and her precocious son, Roger (Milo Parker, a fine enough young actor who will probably end up a Spider-Man one day). Retired to a small country home in Sussex, Holmes is tended to by Mrs. It’s a unique situation for the character, even if it’s one that’s perhaps reflective of a wider cultural need to tear open every last chapter in a fictional person’s life as though it were a Christmas present. By the 1947 in which much of the film takes place, Holmes (Ian McKellen) is over the hill and well past his gaming days. Holmes tells the story of London’s most celebrated consulting detective during the twilight of his years. Adapted from Mitch Cullin’s “A Slight Trick of the Mind,” Mr. Holmes has some fun as a mini-exegesis on what does and doesn’t belong in the Holmes canon, but makes for an otherwise humdrum addition to that canon on its own terms.Īfter two rounds with the teenage offspring of cinema’s most popular character, Condon’s interpretation of another silver screen regular has an intriguing setup. Like the great detective himself, any studied follower of the Holmes short stories and novels can separate the facts from the hearsay. Arthur Conan Doyle had no more control of the phrases and details his most famous creation would appropriate than he did the maddening popularity of the character. Holmes, and it’s a game as tired and apocryphal as such a phrase being credited to Sherlock Holmes.

Movie review sherlock holmes 2015