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In reply to the discussion: What movie can you watch again and again? I like "All The President's Men" It is complicated [View all]aint_no_life_nowhere
(21,925 posts)Unfortunately, it's not my cup of tea. I just don't see Mr. Cumberbatch as incarnating Sherlock Holmes, not the way the three great actors who previously played him have: Basil Rathbone, Jeremy Brett, and Peter Cushing. And I don't think the 21st century is a proper setting for the Holmes stories. Much of the charm of Holmes resides in the fact he used cutting edge forensics and psychological profiling during the Victorian era. Nowadays, with advances in police science, there is much less for him to do in the modern era that sets himself apart as a great superhero that he was in the 1890s. And in the original Conan Doyle stories there's the interesting contrast between Holmes and the many aristocrats who he deals with who have to come begging for his help; Holmes, somewhat misanthropic and arrogant, was at ease among the masses as well as in any social strata and was beyond social class, a distinctive superhero quality really missing when the story is based in the 21st century. Holmes could get away with insulting even Kings, the way he did at the end of A Scandal In Bohemia where he refused to shake his client the King's hand and insulted him without the King's realizing it when he suggested that the woman the King refused to marry, a commoner, and whose photo Holmes was hired to retrieve, Irene Adler, was clearly not at the King's social level (expressed in a sarcastic way by Holmes which is understood to imply that she was at a higher level than the King).