This one-off Sherlock Holmes film for television starts in quite focused, dynamic, and dramatic fashion with a scene of Professor Moriarty escaping his hanging in quite a clever fashion. Unfortunately, the rest of the film doesn't really maintain this standard, and it descends into what is for the most part a laughable, though interesting, muddle.
The plot first. On the whole, it doesn't seem to make much sense, and I couldn't tell quite whether the filmmakers were trying to cleave to the Sherlock Holmes canon (they included many rehashed incidents and lines of dialogue from Arthur Conan Doyle) or strike out on their own (this certainly resembles no particular story), but what they do come up with is mainly vague hints of danger and a bit about a disgraced actress with unexplained superpowers of hypnosis. It doesn't really hold the attention nor does it come together cohesively.
Edward Woodward notoriously looks nothing like Sherlock Holmes, but I got past that quite quickly. He actually does a very good job with the part. His Holmes is in the Jeremy Brett mold and while he certainly not as good as Brett's masterful performances as the detective, he is very worth watching. His Holmes is appropriately spiky and irascible but with a sense of humor, and he manages to make the exaggerated dialogue written for him to show how loyal he is to his brother Mycroft believable.
Mycroft as played by Peter Jeffrey is very much the creature-of-habit civil servant, and important element of the the Mycroft Holmes character that we don't often see. However, after the scene lifted from "The Greek Interpreter" in which the brothers have a deduction contest through the window, we don't get the slightest hint that Mycroft is is supposed to be the intellectual better of the world's greatest detective -- or even of higher than average intelligence. Many scenes of Mycroft being tortured for information pile up and become repetitive as well as exploitive.
Moriarty here, and most of the scenes he appears in (as well as that in which mystery-hypnotist-woman puts her lover in a trance) are so overplayed that they become complete unintentionally funny cheese. Anthony Andrews overacts completely as the professor; his only character work seems to consist of "I am utterly evil." The villain is portrayed as sashaying around an office full of Egyptian mummies, while apparently keeping a poisonous snake in a cigar box just so he can kill people by asking them to get a cigar.
John Hillerman is largely adequate as Watson, though a little shallow in his constant semi-bewilderment. To top it off, most of the dialogue is quite cliché-ridden and content-free. There's a certain interest to this film as another interpretation of Holmes and an apparent attempt to "darken" the detective for the 1990s, but it mostly comes off as misguided and silly.
The plot first. On the whole, it doesn't seem to make much sense, and I couldn't tell quite whether the filmmakers were trying to cleave to the Sherlock Holmes canon (they included many rehashed incidents and lines of dialogue from Arthur Conan Doyle) or strike out on their own (this certainly resembles no particular story), but what they do come up with is mainly vague hints of danger and a bit about a disgraced actress with unexplained superpowers of hypnosis. It doesn't really hold the attention nor does it come together cohesively.
Edward Woodward notoriously looks nothing like Sherlock Holmes, but I got past that quite quickly. He actually does a very good job with the part. His Holmes is in the Jeremy Brett mold and while he certainly not as good as Brett's masterful performances as the detective, he is very worth watching. His Holmes is appropriately spiky and irascible but with a sense of humor, and he manages to make the exaggerated dialogue written for him to show how loyal he is to his brother Mycroft believable.
Mycroft as played by Peter Jeffrey is very much the creature-of-habit civil servant, and important element of the the Mycroft Holmes character that we don't often see. However, after the scene lifted from "The Greek Interpreter" in which the brothers have a deduction contest through the window, we don't get the slightest hint that Mycroft is is supposed to be the intellectual better of the world's greatest detective -- or even of higher than average intelligence. Many scenes of Mycroft being tortured for information pile up and become repetitive as well as exploitive.
Moriarty here, and most of the scenes he appears in (as well as that in which mystery-hypnotist-woman puts her lover in a trance) are so overplayed that they become complete unintentionally funny cheese. Anthony Andrews overacts completely as the professor; his only character work seems to consist of "I am utterly evil." The villain is portrayed as sashaying around an office full of Egyptian mummies, while apparently keeping a poisonous snake in a cigar box just so he can kill people by asking them to get a cigar.
John Hillerman is largely adequate as Watson, though a little shallow in his constant semi-bewilderment. To top it off, most of the dialogue is quite cliché-ridden and content-free. There's a certain interest to this film as another interpretation of Holmes and an apparent attempt to "darken" the detective for the 1990s, but it mostly comes off as misguided and silly.