When we heard there was a new blockbuster crime series YOUNG SHERLOCK coming to Amazon, a Prime Original directed by GUY RITCHIE we sent Guy Hale to the premier to find out more. Guy writes novels and he is a big fan of Ritchie’s work, (Sherlock Holmes, Operation Fortune, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare). Here are Guy’s thoughts.
From the first moment of Young Sherlock you know you are in safe hands. The opening shot sweeps up river, swooping under a tree and then rising over the river bank, we are introduced to the Holmes family. It’s a stunning piece of cinematography, sharply cut, the pastoral idyll soon becomes disconcerting. Technically brilliant and sumptuous this image is clearly a Guy Ritchie film but don’t get lost in the clever filmmaking. The image of this particular family, fleetingly captured in a happy moment, is a snapshot of something we have never seen before. A glance into the Holmes family life that formed Sherlock and his even cleverer brother Mycroft.
It seems idyllic… Mycroft fly fishing in the shallows with his father. Sherlock’s mother happily watching from the river bank, setting out the picnic and Sherlock? Supposed to be watching his little sister, he is lost in the box of fishing flies, inspecting their intricate details. So what of his sister? She has wandered off down river and nobody has seen her go. The inevitable tragedy that follows tears this happy family apart, Sherlocks mother has a mental breakdown and his father takes a post overseas to cover the cost of her care. Poor Sherlock, stricken with guilt, but still too young to process it, is now forced to go to boarding school, it seems like a punishment and maybe it is.
What the writer, Matthew Parkhill has done here, in just a few short scenes, is create a backstory that sets up the whole series. This isn’t the arrogant, over confident Holmes we know so well, this is the young man, scarred by tragedy, his family torn apart, thrown into a world which turns his huge intellect in on itself. It’s a wonderfully clever way to explain his intellectual isolation in later life.
Ritchie and writer Matthew Parkhill have really hit their straps, it’s a fascinating story told and filmed with great drama and humour and they constantly turn our expectations upside down. Then Holmes meets Moriarty. The Moriarty Sherlock meets in Oxford is a good guy – nobody saw that coming. Irish, and at university purely on merit not because his father was married to the daughter of the fifth Duke of the seventh son of Halfwit Hall. He and Sherlock become firm friends but we see clever hints at the antecedence of Moriarty’s turn toward the dark side. The racist treatment that he receives at the hands of Sir Bucephalus Hodge, a very clear nod to Clive of India but on steroids, beautifully played by the ever-excellent Colin Firth, is an early indication. This really is story telling at its finest, Parkhill writes beautiful pictures in words and Ritchie captures them on film. I really hope that this is commissioned for future series because this first series is set up so well.
Apart from Firth and Joseph Fiennes all the stars a very new and they capture the roles that have been written for them perfectly. Hero Fiennes Tiffin is perfect as Young Sherlock, brilliant, likeable and yet unsure of who he really is. Dónal Finn who plays Moriarty has the ability to turn from light to shade in the blink of an eye, here he is mostly in the light but you can see the undercurrent of potential storm clouds gathering. Max Irons is wonderful as a Mycroft who actually seems to care about his younger brother and is not the cold fish he is portrayed as in the Conan Doyle novels. It’s the characters that we fall in love with that make shows great, make us care about what happens to them. In this, Parkhill and Ritchie, have succeeded. I cared about every character, even Sir Bucephalus. I have to give a quick shout out to Zine Tseng who plays Princess Gulun with both humour and a terrifying ability to kill anyone who gets in her way. A fantastic performance from an actor working in her second language.
I’ve tried very hard to not give anything away about the plot lines because I want you to discover it for yourself. For me Young Sherlock is a cracking example of how to take established characters and give them a whole new twist by going back to see what formed them. Congratulations to the team behind this and to Amazon for backing it. Now, if you’re listening Amazon, please commission the next two series, I need to know what happens over the next twenty years.
YOUNG SHERLOCK is available for watching on Amazon Prime Video now.
Check out the latest Aspects of Crime podcast where Guy Hale chats with the writer and creator of YOUNG SHERLOCK – MATTHEW PARKHILL (Deep State, Rogue, The Caller).