As a long-standing fan of the 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories and four novelettes--I have read them all many times--I found nearly all of the video adaptations starring Jeremy Brett to be outstanding, with just a few only very good and a couple of them below that. If DVDs wore out the way VHS tapes did, mine would be ready for the fire that consumed the poor Stockton's worldly possessions at the hands of the villagers following his death in "The Last Vampyre." What a sorry production--not from any technical standpoint, given that everything else was its usual superb self--but because of the meat-axe butchering of a wonderful story, hacked and bludgeoned beyond recognition to fill two hours.
When someone is as good as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was at this particular thing--no one ever was better at detective fiction, and many would say he was unequaled--it is an unforgivable offense to go beyond the reasonable necessities of converting a written work to a visual work. This exceeded those bounds by orders of magnitude and is especially offensive in dropping Holmes into supernatural ridiculousness that anyone familiar with him knows to be completely alien to the character.
They should have changed the characters slightly, added a few pratfalls and some trick bubblegum, and called the movie "Pee-Wee's Great-Grandfather's Big Adventure."
When someone is as good as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was at this particular thing--no one ever was better at detective fiction, and many would say he was unequaled--it is an unforgivable offense to go beyond the reasonable necessities of converting a written work to a visual work. This exceeded those bounds by orders of magnitude and is especially offensive in dropping Holmes into supernatural ridiculousness that anyone familiar with him knows to be completely alien to the character.
They should have changed the characters slightly, added a few pratfalls and some trick bubblegum, and called the movie "Pee-Wee's Great-Grandfather's Big Adventure."