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Fresh from The Natural and with a couple of films to go until Rain Man, Barry Levinson snuck in Young Sherlock Holmes, another adventure of a gawky idiot savant hero, which I initially saw as a lad of twelve one afternoon with my best friend before either of us had developed much discretion. Touted as the first picture to feature a completely computer-generated character and featuring a post-end credits epilogue that we found out about however it was that dorks found out about stuff like that before the Internet, the picture came to me the winter after the summer I'd spent reading the collected works of Arthur Conan Doyle, and the entire experience left me thoroughly enchanted. But in revisiting this slightly sadistic boy's tale, what emerges is less a sense of thrill and awe than a recognition of the oppressive influence that executive producer Steven Spielberg had on this and all of the projects under his pre-DreamWorks aegis, Amblin Entertainment.
Holmes (Nicholas Rowe) and rotund John Watson (Alan Cox) meet, the film suggests, at an exclusive boarding school, where Holmes romances lovely Elizabeth (Sophie Ward) while shepherded by doting professor Rathe (Anthony Higgins). Holmes has an Aryan rival, of course, and despite a few half-hearted intimations at ratiocination, the whole thing serves mainly as a colourless rehash of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (indeed, the original title of the film was Sherlock Holmes and the Pyramid of Fear) that makes up for its lack of any particular racism with a sort of amazing amount of girl abuse. (In a way, the picture also predicts screenwriter Chris Columbus' eventual adaptations of the first two Harry Potter novels.) The particulars of the case, something to do with a string of mysterious suicides precipitated by an Egyptian cult existing in Holmes-era London, aren't nearly as interesting as the lengths to which Spielberg and company go to make Homes "exciting" for a mid-eighties youth audience that mostly learned what they knew about popular entertainment from twin godheads Spielberg and George Lucas.
Skewing Doyle's creation dangerously towards the virile (and the literary Holmes was known to bend fireplace pokers) and away from the intellectual is the mortal sin that Young Sherlock Holmes commits above all others. Its special effects hold up a lot better than one would suspect, but they remain so out-of-place in the story that the question of their insertion is one of plausibility rather than appearance. No more so, however, than the decision to end things with a pagan ritual and a swordfight that finds the love interest treated most foully before she throws herself in front of an assassin's bullet. The reason that Holmes was a bachelor who could never really figure out women, Levinson suggests, isn't that he lost his true love, but that his true love was essentially tortured to death in a big-budget extravaganza that provided the bastard sire for Jar Jar Binks (Jar Jar's grandpa was a stained-glass knight).
At the least, and for all its faults, Young Sherlock Holmes casts a British actor in Rowe as the deerstalker-clad sleuth; Rodney Gibbons' made-for-Canadian-TV quartet of Holmes flicks casts American-born, Canadian-raised Matt Frewer in the lead and, in the process, does for Holmes what Tom Hulce did for Mozart. Although there are moments--most of them having to do with the idea of exactly how alien a freak like Holmes is in any environment--that compel in The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Sign of the Four, The Case of the Whitechapel Vampire (based on "The Sussex Vampire") and The Royal Scandal (based on "Scandal in Bohemia"), the overriding feeling one gets from these zero-budget capers is that a dedicated watering-down has taken place, only to be punctuated now and again by one of the most bizarre/inspired casting gambits in modern memory.
Recapping archetypal Holmes stories a tedious thing to do, best to say that The Whitechapel Vampire downplays and integrates Frewer's manic energy the most successfully while The Hound of the Baskervilles (which really sees Holmes in a cameo role) locates Watson (an excellent Kenneth Welsh) at the centre of its Doyle-lite matinee and is exceptionally tepid. Each ninety-minute picture suffering from the slip-shod pace of a telefilm (though it could be argued that, serialized as Doyle's works were, they, too, suffer from a similar rat-a-tat rise and fall), if and when they ever work it's due mainly to individual moments in which Frewer delivers a familiar line in a way so insouciant or arrogant that the source material practically begs to be re-examined. A scrawl preceding each episode carefully outlines the fact that Doyle's works have fallen into the public domain, the sort of disclaimer that just doesn't bode well.
Paramount presents Young Sherlock Holmes on a bare-bones DVD whose paucity of supplementary material is more justified this time out for a selection from the studio's eighties genre cache than was the case with the thorny Dragonslayer. The 1.85:1 anamorphic video transfer looks quite good--better is the honouring of DP Stephen Goldblatt's spacious compositions and dusky colour palette. Goldblatt is a slick cinematographer (his best work is still on Joe vs. the Volcano), but married to the right transfer and format, his "frankness" intoxicates. For what is in essence a catalogue title, Paramount provides a DD 5.1 remix that gives all six speakers a surprisingly muscular, multi-directional workout. It's a mixed blessing, of course, as good Holmes should probably be more of a dialogue-driven thing than an exploding-glass, riding-chandeliers sort of thing.
Special features adorn neither Young Sherlock Holmes nor Artisan's two-disc DVD release The Sherlock Holmes Collection. Packaged in a swing-chambered keepcase housing both platters, one of the very obvious reasons that another distributor has since absorbed Artisan is highlighted by the decision to put two-and-a-half of the pictures on the first disc, and one-and-a-half of the pictures on the second. First disc? Dual-layered. Second disc? Single. How much money did this save Artisan once upon a time? Not much. How stupid was this idea? Very. The picture quality veers wildly between not-bad to why-is-there-a-sandstorm-in-London?, with black levels frequently pathetic and grain endemic. I don't know how picture quality in a film that doesn't rely on stock footage can vary so much, but there you have it--I'm guessing some combination of directorial incompetence (though Gibbons is a cinematographer by trade), budget problems, and lazy mastering. The Dolby 2.0 surround track meets expectations for made-for-Canadian-television audio.-Walter Chaw
© Film Freak Central; filmfreakcentral.net. This review may not be reprinted, in whole or in part, without the express consent of its author. |
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DVD GRADES:
Image A
Sound A |
DVD VITALS:
Running Time
108 minutes
MPAA
PG-13
Aspect Ratio(s)
1.85:1 ONLY, 16x9-enhanced
Languages
English DD 5.1,
English Dolby Surround,
French Mono
CC
Yes
Subtitles
English
DVD-5
Region One
Paramount
Buy at Amazon USA
Buy at Amazon Canada
or Compare Prices
DVD GRADES:
Image D
Sound C+ |
DVD VITALS:
Running Time
90 minutes each
MPAA
Not Rated
Aspect Ratio(s)
Standard 1.33:1
Languages
English Dolby Surround
CC
Yes
Subtitles
None
DVD-9 + DVD-5
Region One
Artisan/FHE
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Published: July 5, 2004
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