Catching up on my blog some more. I saw this with a couple of wonderful ladies (my aunt and cousin) in Menlo Park. I had also seen the first ~20 minutes at the SF International Film Festival before a fire alarm drove us all out of the theater.
Anyway, Sir Ian McKellen plays an elderly, retired Sherlock Holmes, suffering from the onset of senility and living out in the country taking care of bees. He's struggling to remember the facts of his last case, so that he can finally write his own story and correct some of the misconceptions (intentional or otherwise) that Watson and and his books' illustrators had created. But there's more there than just setting the record straight, there was something about that last case--a seemingly ordinary affair of a husband wanting his wife followed to find out what she's up to--that upset him enough to make him retire. The story is slow at first, and takes some dead ends (the trip to Japan and viewing the devastation of the A-bomb has potential, but ultimately goes nowhere.) But McKellen's fine performance keeps everything interesting. And as the clues unfold, we get a nice conclusion about how a good story is more important than getting all the facts right. Which is a pretty good moral for an intentionally revisionist take on Sherlock Holmes.
Running Time: 102 minutes
My Total Minutes: 405,224
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