movies: mr holmes

Imagine if Sherlock Holmes was real and was coming to the end of his life and the thing he'd always relied on, his memory and intellect, was failing him. And imagine that he's trying to remember the details of his very last case... the one that caused him to give up life as a detective and live in relative seclusion on the Dover coast.

That's essentially Mr Holmes in a nutshell.

And it's the amazing skills of Ian McKellen that makes this movie what it is... he's brilliant both as the very elderly Holmes but also as the Holmes on his last case. There's also some fantastic makeup work to get him to look so very, very old, but a lot of it just comes down to his amazing ability to control his face.

Managing to hold their own up against Sir Ian are Laura Linney as his housekeeper, Mrs Munro and young Milo Parker as her son Roger who forms a bond with Mr Holmes. Parker is actually amazingly good... other than the odd moment of precociousness, which I think was more about the script than his performance, he's a great young actor.

It's a simple story, although well told, and full of just enough moments of Mr Holmes doing "the thing" as Roger calls it... where he tells a character exactly what they've been doing, which is always what you want in a Holmes story.

yani's rating: 3 apiary out of 5