Young Sherlock Holmes

(Movie Review)

This is a movie from the 80s that I remember seeing commercials for, but never being allowed to see. I remember thinking the commercials looked really interesting, but I knew better than to ask if I could see it. This movie was rated PG-13. At the time, I wasn't even allowed to watch Tom and Jerry cartoons, because they were too violent.

In fact I remember our babysitter at the time mentioning that she had gone to see “The Young Sherlock Holmes” over the weekend, and she could confirm that it was definitely not a movie for children. This half scared me off, and half made me want to see it all the more.

I say “half scared me off” because I had not yet seen one of these infamous “not appropriate for children” movies, and in my imagination they assumed all sorts of terrifying and demonic proportions.

I did wonder a lot how movies like “The Young Sherlock Holmes” and “Goonies” (another movie I wasn't allowed to see) which featured children as the main characters could be so awful. I would sometimes have dreams about sneaking into the movie theater or something to see one of those “not appropriate for children movies” and then see that it was a movie about a group of kids off on an adventure. Although the frequency of these dreams has decreased as I've gotten older, this is one of the recurring dreams from childhood that has continued with me as an adult, and I will still occasionally dream about watching what is supposed to be a really violent movie, only to find out that it is simply a group of kids riding around on bikes or something like that.

In the years following, I have since caught up with most of the movies from my childhood that I wasn't allowed to see (Gremlins, Ghostbusters, Goonies, Indiana Jones, Top Gun, Karate Kid, etc). I never got around to this movie, partly because it was not as successful as the others, and therefore harder to track down in the video store, and partly because friends of mine who had seen it gave it mostly blah reviews.

However the other day I was reminiscing with some of my students about movies from the 80s, and I remembered this film. And then, wouldn't you know it, it turns out my local video store here in Japan has a copy.

Since Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson meet each other for the first time as adults in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's “A Study in Scarlet”, the story in this movie is distinctly extra-canonical. And yet, aside from that one minor continuity glitch, everything else in this movie lines up very well with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories. If the first few chapters of “A Study in Scarlet” can be temporarily forgotten (or ret-conned, as us comic book fans say) the story in the movie not only works well with the rest of Sherlock Holmes continuity, but helps to explain a lot of things Conan Doyle never got around to explaining, such as the origin of Holmes’s distinctive deer-stalker cap, coat, and pipe, the beginnings of Holmes’s relationship with Inspector Lestrade, the origins of Moriarity and his rivalry with Holmes, and finally the reason Holmes has maintained a distance from women all his adult life.
This last reason, the death of a true love, turns out to be remarkably similar to the reason Ian Fleming gives for James Bond inability to stay monogamous, but since Ian Fleming was inspired by the Fu-Manchu series, which in turn was inspired by Sherlock Holmes, I suppose its not altogether inappropriate that the characters share this link.

The story in this movie, about an Egyptian cult of the dead in an underground temple, is at points very similar to “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom”, particularly a scene with a human sacrifice, lots of chanting, and the young heroes looking on horrified from their hiding place. I’m going to have to double check the dates, but I suspect this movie came out after “Temple of Doom” and was trying to cash in on the Indiana Jones adventure craze.

Again, this is not entirely inappropriate, since Indiana Jones was based partly on the adventure movies of the 30s, which in turn were based off of stories like “Sherlock Holmes” and “Fu-Manchu”. In fact the real sin is not that they attempted to rip Indiana Jones off, but that they failed so horribly in doing so.

Which brings me to the flaws of this film…
I’m told this film has been criticized because the story involves Holmes and Watson more or less stumbling onto the bad guys, instead of using Holmes characteristic deductive reasoning. However as I mentioned in my book review of Sherlock Holmes, some of Conan Doyle’s original stories also follow this pattern, so I don’t hold that against the film. Also in the movie, like Conan Doyle’s stories, Holmes does not share all of his information with Watson at the time, but only once the case is all over does he reveal how he solved it.

Unfortunately in the movie the viewer gets to see some of the assassinations in the film, and thus has more information than Holmes does, which is unfortunate and takes away from the suspense a little bit. Also the victims are shot with a poison dart which causes them to hallucinate, and (again unfortunately) we the viewer have to sit through these hallucinations, which I suspect were just an excuse to cram some Hollywood special effects into this movie and make it more marketable.

Really, sometimes you have to wonder what in the world Hollywood is thinking. I don’t know a single person who likes those weird dream/ Hallucination sequences (unless watching them while high), and yet Hollywood films are often full of them.

Also the directing in this film is terrible. None of the action sequences are choreographed with any sort of suspense, and most of the physical action in this movie doesn't make any sense at all. Examples:
- --the heroine is abducted by the bad guy, and she appears to run off with him without making any effort to resist whatsoever.
- --The bad guys with swords are the clumsiest bad guys ever, and can’t seem to hit Holmes or Watson, even though the latter two are making what look like only lazy efforts to get away.
- --A character gets knocked into the ice water, and sinks way too quickly.
---A crash landing, which should have been a dramatic sequence, is almost boring. I could go on and on.

Verdict: Worth watching for Sherlock Holmes fans or 80s nostalgia, but there are good reasons why this film never became a classic.

Useless Wikipedia Fact
"Candidate" is a derivative of the Latin word "candida" (white). In Ancient Rome, people running for political office would often wear togas chalked and bleached to be bright white at speeches, debates, conventions, and other public functions

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Young Sherlock Holmes: Movie Review (Scripted)