I saw this movie before reading any reviews, and I thought it was very funny. I was very surprised to see the overwhelmingly negative reviews this film received from critics.

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

Sherlock Holmes (Ian McKellen) is aged up, living in retirement, tending to his bees in the country. He tries to remember his last case from 30 years ago the outcome of which was changed by Dr Watson in his writings. The case concerned a man who consulted Mr Holmes about his wife who miscarried twice. Holmes observes that she wishes to do harm to her husband but later realises that she wishes to kill herself.Looking after him is his housekeeper, Mrs Munro (Laura Linney) and her young son Roger (Milo Parker.) However the housekeeper is worried about her future where Holmes is getting increasing decrepit and she is looking for another job. Holmes on a visit to Japan is looking for a substance to rejuvenate his memories where he also meets a man who thinks that Holmes once knew his father.Sherlock also finds time to see himself on celluloid as his adventures were adapted for the movies, played badly by an actor (Nicholas Rowe, reprising his role three decades after Young Sherlock Holmes.)This is an elegant film with a buzz about McKellen's performance. However it is a slight film that does wrap up its various plot lines very neatly.

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.

The, perhaps most gifted, classical actor of today, Sir Ian McKellen stars in this film about the most famous fictional detective ever created, who tells us himself, towards the end of the canonical stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, that when Sherlock Holmes retired he became a beekeeper. (Several stories occur during and after his retirement.) In addition to McKellen, Laura Linney, with a sometimes shaky British accent, plays Holmes' housekeeper Mrs. Munro and Milo Parker plays her young son Roger, Holmes' young follower and admirer.Mention should be made of Nicholas Rowe who famously played young Sherlock many years ago but, in this film, he is in a brief satiric "matinee movie" scene, a nice touch.The similarities to the earlier film "Gods and Monsters" (1998) in which the same star, Ian McKellen, played the director James Whale, of the original Frankenstein films, is also not accidental with the story having to do with the final days of that director surrounded by real and fictional characters. It had the same director Bill Condon, as well.Based on the Mitch Cullin novel, A Slight Trick of the Mind, Holmes here is gradually losing his memory and can't recall the facts of his last case and Watson's account of it he finds untrustworthy. But since Watson is described as rarely being around at this time, I can only wonder if Watson would have written that account.

My first attempt at watching this movie never got off the ground, so I sort of wrote it off as not worth it. Later another opportunity came along, so I decided to give it a second chance. I must say that as the movie progressed it drew me in more & more. As the ending neared, the story felt so real & heartwarming...this made me very glad that I had decided to watch it after all.