Kelly WandA Study in Terror
October 4th 2006 02:48
Well, the title may be over selling the case. Despite a strong cast, great locations and good score, the one thing lacking from this film is terror. A film that pits Sherlock Holmes against Jack the Ripper promises a clash of titans. Instead, two ships pass in the night. There is a bit of a ruckus in the final reel but nothing memorable. This is, potentially, the perfect pairing for a battle of wits but the promised bangs are little more than whimpers.
For a start, the pacing is a little too brisk and the murders staged a little too camply for any real terror. There is no space for suspense. The direction is efficient and sometimes imaginative but there is no sense of fear in the fog and no real sympathy for the victims. Each of the actresses gets two minutes to build a character only to have it assassinated. There is a little too much of a sense of arousal in these scenes and far too much misogyny in their execution.
There is also too much Holmes and not enough Jack. To make matter worse, John Neville plays Holmes as a smug little fucker whose concerns extend no further than saving the good name of a family of upper crust sociopaths. He solves crimes because they are a game for his intellect and he makes no emotional contact with anything. I always thought of Holmes as a man who tried to hide his passions behind an apparently safe veneer of logic. His imperfections in the source material really bear this out.
Here Holmes has no foibles besides playing violin badly. Holmes without his addictions, obsessions and bruised compassion is a poor companion. Jack the Ripper, meanwhile, turns out to be an utter push over whose true identity seems to have been plucked from the ether with nary a clue in sight and only a script writer’s need for expediency as proof. Donald and Derek (and we should never trust a man named Derek) Ford wrote the screenplay by numbers. To paraphrase Holmes; eliminate the more obvious candidates and whoever is left – no matter how unlikely – must be the murderer.
Let us ignore the fact that Holmes pursued the bloodied murderer through the fog shrouded streets only to find his soon to be chief suspect standing cool, calm and with not a hair out of place in a clinic. Whilst the speed in which he achieved this transformation would have eliminated him from most suspects lists, the fact that he knew how to restore a dropped scalpel in an all too obvious place is all the evidence Sherlock needs to get his man.
Okay, I’ve seen worse. It passed the time more pleasantly than yet another re-run of old Simpson episodes but I could not recommend this film to anyone except fans of “Murder She Wrote”. Believe me ye disciples of Jessica Fletcher, you’ll feel right at home with this baby (and if that’s not damning with faint praise then I don’t know what is).
There are far better Ripper films (“From Hell” springs immediately to mind) and far better Sherlock Holmes films (too many to mention). There is even a far better Holmes versus Ripper flick called “Murder by Decree”.
Next!
For a start, the pacing is a little too brisk and the murders staged a little too camply for any real terror. There is no space for suspense. The direction is efficient and sometimes imaginative but there is no sense of fear in the fog and no real sympathy for the victims. Each of the actresses gets two minutes to build a character only to have it assassinated. There is a little too much of a sense of arousal in these scenes and far too much misogyny in their execution.
There is also too much Holmes and not enough Jack. To make matter worse, John Neville plays Holmes as a smug little fucker whose concerns extend no further than saving the good name of a family of upper crust sociopaths. He solves crimes because they are a game for his intellect and he makes no emotional contact with anything. I always thought of Holmes as a man who tried to hide his passions behind an apparently safe veneer of logic. His imperfections in the source material really bear this out.
Here Holmes has no foibles besides playing violin badly. Holmes without his addictions, obsessions and bruised compassion is a poor companion. Jack the Ripper, meanwhile, turns out to be an utter push over whose true identity seems to have been plucked from the ether with nary a clue in sight and only a script writer’s need for expediency as proof. Donald and Derek (and we should never trust a man named Derek) Ford wrote the screenplay by numbers. To paraphrase Holmes; eliminate the more obvious candidates and whoever is left – no matter how unlikely – must be the murderer.
Let us ignore the fact that Holmes pursued the bloodied murderer through the fog shrouded streets only to find his soon to be chief suspect standing cool, calm and with not a hair out of place in a clinic. Whilst the speed in which he achieved this transformation would have eliminated him from most suspects lists, the fact that he knew how to restore a dropped scalpel in an all too obvious place is all the evidence Sherlock needs to get his man.
Okay, I’ve seen worse. It passed the time more pleasantly than yet another re-run of old Simpson episodes but I could not recommend this film to anyone except fans of “Murder She Wrote”. Believe me ye disciples of Jessica Fletcher, you’ll feel right at home with this baby (and if that’s not damning with faint praise then I don’t know what is).
There are far better Ripper films (“From Hell” springs immediately to mind) and far better Sherlock Holmes films (too many to mention). There is even a far better Holmes versus Ripper flick called “Murder by Decree”.
Next!
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