Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Cast: Ian McKellen, Laura Linney, Milo Parker, Hattie Morahan, Patrick Kennedy, Frances de la Tour, Hiroyuki Sanada, Roger Allam, Philip Davis, Nicholas Rowe, Madeleine Worrall, Sarah Crowden, Takako Akashi, Zak Shukor, Michael Culkin, Sam Coulson, Frances Barber, John Sessions, Colin Starkey.

There is perhaps a question of whether age diminishes the achievements that have been made in youth or whether to be seen as fallible, to be seen as mortal actually enhances the great strides made when life was to be moulded, when Time was not feared and the weakness that must come to us all as frailty and memory forsake the owner.

For the master detective, arguably the greatest of them all, Sherlock Holmes, Time has become an enemy that bites, snarls and is as imperfect as the country that the man who survived the Reichenbach Falls now finds himself, alone and haunted by the past mistakes which were never rectified.

If, as is perhaps hinted at in the film, to see a hero fall is to remind us of our own inadequacies, our own failings and unsound moments of judgement, then Mr. Holmes is quite possibly the starkest and more beautiful portrayal of the cinematic detective for many years and ranks alongside the great Jeremy Brett in his interpretation of the man from Baker Street.

Life, like art, is an illusion. The many fabrications set out by Holmes’ now estranged friend Doctor John Watson as fiction replaced fact has helped and hindered the memory of the detective and as he sits in quiet reflective solitude, surrounded only bees, his housekeeper and her son, the past breaks through and for this, the look of a life as it draws to its conclusion is to be applauded.

Whether the cinema audience is ready to see arguably the greatest fictional detective of them all fall into the arms of senility is an argument only they can decide but for Ian McKellen this is truly a role in which he surely relishes completely. The defiance of not giving into mortality, of finding the very names of the past placed in a cloud and the sheer delight of bringing this very human aspect to the thoughts of all who see his performance, all combine to make this Ian McKellen’s greatest screen role since Richard III in 1995.

Supported by Milo Parker as the son of the housekeeper and a very enjoyable, if short, performance by Frances de la Tour, Ian McKellen strides across the screen as the fictional detective made real with such passion that in terms of screen presence only Hattie Morahan as the object of his misgivings comes close to dragging the camera off him at all times.

If we do not see our heroes fall and become infallible then how do we look upon them with privilege and the thought of knowledge being incorruptible? In Mr. McKellen’s portrayal as Sherlock Holmes, the hero, the leading man, is as human as the rest of us and that makes him ever more the champion of justice.

Ian D. Hall