Mr Holmes (PG)
Director: Bill Condon, Cast: Ian McKellan, Laura Linney, Hiroyuki Sanada, Running Time: 103 mins
“Sherlock as you’ve never seen him before,” says the tagline for the movie. And it’s correct.
Mr Holmes, which opens Friday, offers us the legendary sleuth at the age of 93, retired to the Sussex seaside, where he is fighting off hints of dementia and the physical demands of time. There are no flurries of action or fights to the death here.
Mr Holmes is a slowly evolving character study that contrasts the real Sherlock with the hero of Dr John Watson’s creation; a pretend biopic which re-imagines Sherlock as a man impudently misrepresented by his myth.
There are mysteries, of course, a collection of relatively small scale mysteries, all of them feeding into the main purpose of the movie.
Having been depicted on screen 254 times, the Guinness Books of Records confirmed last month that Sherlock Holmes is the most portrayed literary character in film and TV history. Since his creation in 1887, Holmes has been played by over 75 different actors including Christopher Lee, Charlton Heston, Peter O'Toole, Christopher Plummer, Basil Rathbone, Peter Cook, Roger Moore, John Cleese, Benedict Cumberbatch and Robert Downey Jr.
As you’d expect, Mr Holmes is dominated by the performance of Ian McKellan, working again with his Gods & Monsters director, Bill Condon, but playing Sherlock for the first time with a suavity and authority that makes you feel that of all the Holmes, he could possibly be the most natural.
His voice is rich and treacly and he moves with grace and purpose that makes you want to study him. I would advise the producers to book him up right away, take this Holmes out of retirement and build a small scale but richly conceived franchise around him.
Entourage (15A)
Director: Doug Ellin, Cast: Adrian Grenier, Jeremy Piven, Kevin Connolly, Running Time: 104 mins
Entourage, which we mentioned last week, is a spin-off from a cable TV series which ran for eight seasons on the HBO network in the US. Allegedly based on Mark Wahlberg’s experiences as a young actor, it tells of a hot movie star, Vince Chase (Adrien Grenier), from Queens, New York who takes three friends with him when he moves to Hollywood – the idea is that the entourage would play both a functional part in his professional life and help to keep him grounded.
As the TV series often did, Entourage revolves around the making of a movie – the actor’s former agent Ari (Jeremy Piven) has become a studio boss and he has allowed his ex-client to both star in, and direct, a new production. Unfortunately Vince runs over budget and Ari has to agree to take on the precocious, self-serving son (Haley Joel Osment, the grown-up child star of The Sixth Sense) of a rich Texas financier to get it completed.
There really isn’t much story in Entourage – or much action for that matter – but with a running time of 104 minutes it doesn’t overstay its welcome and the dialogue has enough zingers to sustain it as a passable comedy.
Guest actors include Liam Neeson, Armie Hammer, Martin Landau, Wahlberg, Kelsey Grammer, Mike Tyson, Ed O’Neill and Jessica Alba, so worth it for a spot of cameo bingo, at the very least.
The Longest Ride (12A)
Director: George Tillman Jr, Cast: Britt Robertson, Scott Eastwood, Alan Alda, Running Time: 128 mins
The Longest Ride, which is also released yesterday, is the tenth – and latest – movie based on a novel by conservative romantic fiction writer Nicholas Sparks. Sparks’ stories are formulaic weepies in which his lovers tend to have to overcome time, geography and/or class (The Notebook) in order to be together.
In this one, Scott Eastwood – Clint’s son – plays a former champion bull rider attempting to make a comeback and Britt Robertson, recently seen (though not by many) in Tomorrowland is the university arts student he meets when he loses his hat at a rodeo meet. She’s about to take up an internship in New York and their affair seems doomed until they rescue an elderly man (Alan Alda) in a road crash and they see their relationship reflected in his marriage to his late wife.
I’ve never read a Nicholas Sparks novel and I don’t know if they are any better in book form than they are as movies, but in the cinema they generally seem forced, contrived and lacking in character credibility.
There is an extra problem here in that the story of the road crash victim and his wife is told in flashback and they are played by Oona Chaplin (Charlie’s granddaughter) and Jack Huston (John’s grandson) – who act everyone else off the screen.
