Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes: Maybe the Best Movie Ever

My mother took ill, and as such, she was more willing to watch horrible, low-budget movies on Netflix with me (she is actually very willing to do this under normal conditions, unless they're horror movies or foreign). And so I plumbed the depths of Netflix, finding and watching those movies which clog up the queue yet remain unwatched until a day such as this.

The movie we watched was an adaptation of Sherlock Holmes done by a studio called "The Asylum". It featured a dinosaur on its cover, next to The Clock Tower, so I felt like I had made a good choice in bad movie. I also take it upon myself to watch many, many adaptations of Sherlock Holmes, because I like to complain about the ones that aren't good. As any normal person does.

Following is a list of the reasons I make the very ambitious claim in the title. Also, spoilers, obviously, so you should probably watch it if you care, or read the story it was based on, "Robots Try to Kill the Queen"*

1) The Asylum is a studio well-known for making movies that are ridiculous. Its usual plan is to make movies that are very similar to upcoming big-budget movies very quickly and using very little money. It also puts out things featuring Mega Shark. As the name suggests, it is a giant shark. In one of its scenes it ate a plane out of the sky. Quite literally. So I knew that something good would come from this movie which reminded us not to confuse it with the version with Robert Downey Jr. Which we were not really in danger of doing in the first place.

2) There is a dinosaur. I feel like I cannot overstate this. While at the end it is revealed to have been... something... I'm still unclear on, it is still a dinosaur in the decidedly un-supernatural universe of Sherlock Holmes. A dinosaur. Also, a kraken. Yeah.

3) The plot is the most convoluted and beautiful thing ever. It opens with the aforementioned kraken destroying a ship. We later discover that this kraken is a robot. Built by the villain (more on him later, because that is an entire point in itself) to steal money in order to buy the materials for his dinosaur robot. Which he used to steal the materials to make his robot-suit. Which he used to... Build a dragon to fly into Buckingham Palace? This is what I pieced together. There was also a revenge thing, and an android caretaker (and lover?). Despite being the supposed motive for all this robot-building, the revenge was mentioned so late, and was overshadowed by so many ridiculous robots, that it felt like a subplot.

4) Holmes' brother was the villain. This to me was the most ridiculous point. For one, they renamed him to "Thorpe"**. Thorpe is not a name. Also, he built a robot suit for himself (which is why he built all those other robots) because he was paralysed from an accident. However. All of these other robots were very well made, and included an android assistant The suit he built made him look like he cut joints in a hot water heater and put it on. There is a very large difference in quality here, that was never explained. If you can make an android that convinces basically everyone, why can't you make yourself a normal-looking replacement body?, I wanted to ask this brother who was inexplicably not named Mycroft. Even in the unlikely event that this android came to him and offered him help (not a thing they are known for, and it means there are other people building sophisticated robots in Victoria England, which is weird), he built other, equally convincing robots. Why can't he make himself look like a human being again? It was very confusing. He also built a flying dragon he planned to kill the Queen with (?) so that he could frame Lestrade and exact his revenge. I was very confused by this point, to say the least.

5) Sherlock apparently has a first name of Robert in this universe.

6) Sherlock gets shot, but comes back later and makes a quip about how "everyone said my addiction would kill me". Cocaine cannot solve blood loss. And also this doesn't really make sense but whatever. There's a dragon robot. I think they gave up on making sense.

7) The actor who plays Sherlock is just awful at what he does and I was happy when I thought he had died (plus, I'd get to put as a point that he dies in this movie, which would have been great).

8) Since this movie was so low-budget, the effects were just great. There were also some scenes where I realised that from an outsider's perspective, it would have looked like a cameraman following two people LARPing in the Welsh countryside, for no obvious reason, which is a beautiful thing to picture.

Overall, this movie was actually kind of engaging, as well as being utterly an absolutely ridiculous. At the very least, the last half hour was about a million times more interesting than (the last hour and a half of) Transformers 3, which had a MUCH larger budget. It was also more engaging and made more sense than Captain America, or really a lot of other movies I have seen that were supposedly decent.

I think you all should watch this movie, and then report back.

*I hope I do not actually need to tell you that this is not a real Holmes story***. (though I kind of think it should be)

**Wikipedia's summary of this movie calls him "Springheel Jack" which, while interesting, is mentioned nowhere in the movie and actually served to confuse me even more.

***The whole thing is narrated by an aged Watson to his caretaker (probably not a robot) during the Blitz, so in the universe of the movie, it IS one of the stories, which is great. He also dies immediately after finishing it (well, finishing it, and relaying how he discovered that Sherlock's name was actually Robert Sherlock Holmes), which is poetic and rather cheap.****

****Then the girl he dictated to goes to visit him in the world's most inconvenient cemetery***** and the android caretaker of Thorpe is there. Except nothing happens, so.

*****You have to take a rowboat to the cemetery. If I knew someone who was to be buried there, I'd blow off that funeral, because rowboats are awful.