John Watson (Alan Cox) arrives at Brompton Academy in London. He has transferred in the middle of the term from a northern school. He has hardly set down his bags when a tall, lean fellow regards him briefly then offers an uncanny description of him. However, he guessed James rather than John. This teenaged wonder is Sherlock Holmes. Watson soon finds that Holmes spends a great deal of time with Professor Waxflatter and Elizabeth (Sophie Ward), Waxflatter's niece. Coincidentally, Waxflatter has newspaper clippings lying around that detail recent peculiar deaths. Holmes concludes they must be murders and begins his investigation with Watson and Elizabeth in tow!
The movie has some funny similarities to both the Harry Potter franchise and Indiana Jones. Brompton Academy has a Hogwarts vibe, which is funny as it long predates the Harry Potter series. However, writer Chris Columbus went on to direct the first two Harry Potter movies. Ah, interesting. One can see the heroic trio as Harry, Ron, and Hermione! The bad kid looks uncannily like Draco Malfoy! The scene where all the kids eat in the great hall only needed a few floating candles to fit neatly into Hogwarts. As for the Indiana Jones connection, Stephen Spielberg was an executive producer of this film. The presence of a secret society in a hidden temple who make sacrifices with boiling wax had an uncanny resemblance to Temple of Doom (1984). In fact, if one takes Watson to be Short Round, Elizabeth to be Willie Scott, and Sherlock to be Indy, the similarities are uncanny.
There are the ludicrous bits, of course. Professor Waxflatter has perfected a flying machine in 1870, which Holmes and Watson use to save the day in the climax. Holmes stands on top of a chandelier that is 10 feet above a crowd of dozens and no one notices him. Seriously, how did he get up there without being seen? How is the guy at the altar blind to this skinny youth standing on the chandelier? Ugh. Where previous victims of a hallucinogenic poison could be counted on to accidentally kill themselves, Holmes and his crew are merely inconvenienced, somewhat comically in the case of Watson.
The movie openly admits that it is outside the Holmesian canon, as it proposes a meeting between Holmes and Watson when they were each 16. In fact, they met in 1881 in A Study in Scarlett. Rather than a bespectacled and pudgy man, Watson was described as thin and brown as a nut; he had just returned from India and the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Clearly, the makers of the film used Nigel Bruce as their model rather than the literary Watson.
Like an Indiana Jones film, it has good pacing and plentiful action. Though it clearly teases a sequel, a sequel was never made. It had a mediocre box office performance, failing to launch the Young Sherlock series. Just okay.
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