Mr Holmes (PG)

Reviewed by Demetrios Matheou

Sherlock Holmes, that detective for the ages, is probably more vibrant in the public eye than he's even been. There's Benedict Cumberbatch's supremely haughty turn on the BBC, Jonny Lee Miller's febrile small-screen version in the US, Robert Downey Jr's flamboyant showman in the movies. Holmes is everywhere, timeless and in his prime.

But what if Holmes, like the rest of us, got old? What if his mind started to desert him, the laser-like deductive process became fuzzy, forgetful? Senility is inevitable, but most don't descend from such lofty intellectual heights.

Based on Mitch Cullin's 2005 novel A Slight Trick Of The Mind, Bill Condon's film makes two significant conjectures. The first is that Holmes is a real man, not a character in a book, whose real-life exploits just happen to have been fictionalised by Dr Watson; the second, that he's grown very old and correspondingly fallible.

It's 1947. Sherlock (Ian McKellen) is now in his nineties and living in obscurity in a Suffolk cottage, looking after his bees, having retired some 30 years before. All his old companions - Watson, Mrs Hudson, brother Mycroft, Inspector Lestrade have died. Now with just housekeeper Mrs Munro (Laura Linney) and her young son for company, he's doddery, cantankerous and very forgetful.

But Holmes hasn't given up the ghost, having returned from a trip to Hiroshima with a fabled plant that he hopes will restore enough of his memory to unlock one last mystery - namely the reason why he walked away from his career at the height of his powers. The answer lies in his last case, about which he can recall next to nothing. Through remembering, he hopes to crack the case a second time.

This is a fabulous conceit, with the famously fictional character complaining about being fictionalised, that he has to "play along" with Watson's version, even at one point going to watch a Sherlock Holmes movie. Alongside the meta-textual larks, it offers a poignant portrait of a man famously dismissive of emotion, who is suddenly caught up by loneliness, regret and his own mortality.

McKellen and Condon have form together, having collaborated on Gods And Monsters, back in the pre-Gandalf days when the actor was hugely respected but by no means the film star that he is now. That film presented McKellen as James Whale, real-life director of the first Frankenstein films in the 1930s, who in the 1950s lives alone with his housekeeper and lost in his memories.

Sound familiar? The similarities between the two collaborations are striking, though the earlier film was darker and, I have to say, more successful. Despite the potential of Mr Holmes, and despite a typically nuanced, rum turn by the star, it's actually rather dull.

The key problem is one of balance in the plotting, with far too many rambling scenes involving the housekeeper and son, which fail to take Holmes's story in an interesting direction. And with Sherlock deprived of his intellectual virility, these scenes are as under-powered, as frail as the man himself.

The issue is exacerbated by the presence of flashbacks to the mysterious final case, in which a husband hires Holmes to follow his troubled wife (Hattie Morahan), and which are infinitely more entertaining. Seeing the younger, confident, mentally agile Holmes in these brief scenes only whets our appetite for more; returning to the old man with his bees feels like a terrible let down.

Mr Holmes makes one wish that McKellen had played the famous detective a few years ago, with both actor and character in their prime. This is a casting that seems elementary, only a little too late.