What a load of incomprehensible claptrap! Ian McKellen is a very good actor but this was full of very good actors that were not even given one minutes screen time. It is hailed as the mystery of his last case - what last case? There was no mystery as to what happened. And as for Holmes visiting a remarkable undamaged Nagasaki only two years after the atomic bomb - what? In fact you could have cut the whole Japanese content and made not a jot of difference to the film. This was just a shabby attempt to lure people using the Sherlock Holmes angle, and it turned into a maudlin heap of nothing.

I was searching for a little bit different. Ian is a great actor. Perfect the part of a 93 year old Sherlock Holmes. Using natural remedies, notes, to keep track of what he needs to know. This is a great lesson in dealing with aging, when you can't quite do what you used to be able to do. He is dealing with several things, multi-tasking, and retreats to his farm. There he takes a young boy under his wing, and is inspired by and mentoring at the same time. Ian and Milo are both exceptional;they aren't acting they are BEING their characters. I deduce that mentoring took place off screen as well as on. The twists, turns, sub plot with the mother, te bees, all makes for a compelling story.

So, I watched this without the benefit of knowing anything about it and not having seen any trailers for it. Consequently, I seem to have derived more enjoyment of the film than many others, who seem to be of the opinion that they were misled by the advertising.Intrigued, I did a little sleuthing myself (Youtube is a wonderful repository of movie trailers!) and was rather surprised to find the international trailer painted an entirely different tone to this movie than was actually present.See, Mr. Holmes is a rather uncomfortable look at a great detective who is far into his dotage and going senile, if not suffering directly from Alzheimers. The entire thrust of the movie is him struggling to remember the case that led him to decide to take an early retirement. He senses that he must have done something terrible, but cannot remember what. Of course, in the fullness of the movie's runtime, he does recall the case and why he retired, loose ends are tied up and pretty much everything turns out for the best.The international trailer, however, portrays the movie as a great mystery romp, complete with rather light-hearted music and a complete mish-mashing of several stories told in the film over a large span of years as if they were all part of one, continuous narrative.Accordingly, it is hard not to go into this film (if one watched that int'l trailer) without expect an entirely different movie altogether.Mr. Holmes is a character study, not a great mystery story. Though Holmes does indeed get to the bottom of why he retired, it is not so much a mystery, as him simply managing to put the pieces together and remember what happened.The movie, from my perspective of having no idea what it was going to be like, was fine, if a little slow. Ian McKellen shows exactly why he is so highly regarded as an actor, with a performance that is at once both effortless and endearing. The rest of the small cast also perform well and the movie as a whole is put together rather nicely.But it is slow, and it is not really about the solving of a great mystery. Given the trailer, I can see why so many disliked it.Incidentally, the UK trailer, though still with some rather jollier music than really suits the film, actually bothers to explain the basic premise of the film, so quite why the international trailer was so badly put together is a bit of a mystery.I should note that this isn't the first time a trailer has portrayed a film as something very different from what it actually is, and I doubt it will be the last. Many trailers use footage not in the theatrical cut anyway! It is on us all to watch such things with a healthy dose of skepticism. After all, they exist solely to get us interested enough to go and see a film. Honesty, these days, is a low priority.However, a mis-sold film need not automatically be considered bad. Mr. Holmes is a fine movie. Don't let the misleading advertising ruin your enjoyment of it.SUMMARY: Great character study. Not a mystery story. A small, rather melancholy, drama that delivers rather well, but which was mis-sold in the international market as something it is not. Worth your time if you ever wondered what might happen to Holmes once his wits dulled with age.

I had my doubts about MR. HOLMES when I saw that it was based on a book by an American novelist and had a screenplay by an American writer. I've nothing against our American cousins, but when I sat down and watched the movie my worst fears were confirmed: although the film occasionally plays lip service to the works of Conan Doyle, this is utterly unlike any kind of Sherlock Holmes I've seen before. I didn't recognise him. It's like some American literary novelist's idea of what Holmes should be rather than an attempt to connect with the great man himself. And I know for a fact that there are American pastiche authors whose work will be forever ignored by Hollywood who can write much better Holmes than the one depicted here.The film's idea is to posit Holmes as an elderly man in his final years. The slow-moving narrative mixes together three separate story lines, two from his past and one set in the present day. And the problem with this film? It's so slow! Everything is dragged out to the most minute detail and none of it is interesting, at all. Ian McKellen is a good actor - although Bill Condon is a bit lazy, making almost exactly the same kind of film as his GODS AND MONSTERS from a couple of decades ago - but he doesn't play Holmes here, just some kind of wise old man.Each of the stories has flaws and faults. I was primarily interested in seeing Hiroyuki Sanada (one of my favourite actors) in the Japanese storyline, but it's very weak and simplistic and Sanada only shows up in a couple of scenes. The main mystery back story is depressing and unlike any of the cases that the literary Holmes investigated. The present day stuff is better, but the kid is annoyingly wise and chirpy, and Laura Linney's presence is a big distraction given her awful accent, which is all over the place. Overall, MR. HOLMES is a real bore, something that none of the original stories and few of the earlier adaptations were.