tiger_moran: (Default)
 Tonight I've been rewatching Sherlock - Case of Evil which manages to be terrible but also kind of good in a bad way?

I mean ~sexy~ absinthe-drinking womanising straight Sherlock Holmes, bad

D'Onofrio's Moriarty now reminds me too much of Laszlo from What We Do in the Shadows which is kind of odd more than bad I guess

Moriarty using Holmes to give him an alibi though by staging his own death by making Holmes 'kill' him, good

And Moriarty wearing a bullet-proof vest

And being generally very difficult to actually kill

Mycroft not going anywhere because he's disabled is an interesting idea actually

Semi-acknowledgement that Holmes can't just go around killing people, good (that's always kind of bothered me about the canon. Sometimes they kill people and like... nothing happens? Holmes and Watson seemingly can just get away with murder?) Though Holmes ultimately does still seem to get away with killing people without any consequence in this too

The swordfighting is kind of hot

So is the Moriarty forcibly drugging Holmes I mean wait what

Watson is very different to the canon and the way he meets Holmes and everything is totally different but he still manages to be a badass in a different way, they did not at all go down the 'stupid Watson' route so... good, I guess?

James D'arcy is a very very pretty Holmes
tiger_moran: (Default)
Do you know how tired I am of ~radical~ Sherlock Holmes adaptations which basically have absolutely nothing to do with Sherlock Holmes? The answer is really fucking tired. It's been this succession of things that try to do something ~different~ with canonical characters - things largely about OCs, modern day things, Sherlock Gnomes (yes I have watched it. No I don't know why I did), that shit 'comedy' (which I still frequently get this ridiculous urge to put myself through watching though I know full well it's awful), that really depressing sounding thing about elderly Holmes which I refused to ever watch, etc etc etc. Not to mention the endless bloody Holmes and Lovecraft mashup stories and other ~way out~ stuff that gets published. Now they're on about some show which "picks up shortly after the death of Sherlock Holmes at the hands of Moriarty. In the aftermath, “Dr. John Watson resumes his medical career as the head of a clinic dedicated to treating rare genetic disorders, only to uncover a startling secret that puts him in the crosshairs of Moriarty once again". I DON'T CARE
But asking for anything in which Moriarty and Moran get to be the main characters and protagonists and be close is apparently unreasonable.
Also it's not like things with ~bad guys~ as protagonists and even as protagonists who literally get away with doing terrible things don't exist. A couple of years ago I put myself through watching The Shadow Line which sounded interesting but was honestly a horrible horrible and weirdly oppressive show (I'm not sure what I mean by that even now but a lot of it felt horribly oppressive in a 'being suffocated by its relentless horribleness' way. Also the opening scene in the car where a guy had been murdered was seriously claustrophobic) which killed off something like 14 of the main characters (sometimes, it must be said, in ways that were more ridiculous than anything in Midsomer Murders. With one of them I was literally cackling at how stupid and unrealistic the murder was) and yes that includes the 'good guys' (and a young child). The only main characters to survive were the absolute worst people in it, awful people who weren't engaging at all they were just horrible people who did unpleasant things and had absolutely no morals. But again apparently it's ridiculous to want or expect anyone to create anything with Moriarty and Moran as the main characters. Why?
tiger_moran: (Default)
I've just rewatched Hands of a Murderer which isn't great but also is far from being the worst Sherlock Holmes thing I've ever seen. It's one of those things where they made the 'bad guy' far more interesting than the 'good guys' though; Woodward isn't a completely terrible Holmes but he's just sort of... mediocre. Andrews' Moriarty is far more engaging and interesting. Despite them committing the unforgivable sin of making Moriarty straight in it, his portrayal itself is still one of the few I've always liked. Also it does make an interesting point about Mycroft, as a person of importance in the British government, being one of the people responsible for sending people off to war which is something that definitely ties in to my major issues with Mycroft, and with Sherlock Holmes and Watson and everything else to do with 'law and order' in the stories - the things Mycroft is responsible for and represents (and the things that often Sherlock too, and Watson with him are helping to support) are actually worse than anything Moriarty could ever do, and like Moran... Watson thinks Moran used to be an "honourable soldier" but the things Moran did as an "honourable soldier" were all tied in with colonialism and racism and sending British soldiers to fight and die for 'queen and country' in another country on the other side of the world, a place the queen never even visited and a place probably a lot of the other people, the politicians, playing about with people's lives never even visited either. Moran left the army; he rebelled against all of that, and Moriarty and Moran, they are not responsible for the things that Mycroft and the rest of the government and the monarchy are, and in rebelling against those they are actually rebelling against a lot of really dubious shit, while Watson got forced out of the army through injury and illness and doesn't really seem to see a problem with any of it. This film doesn't actually go that far nor does it bother to include Moran (there is a colonel connected to Moriarty but he's not Moran and as far as I can tell is not intended to be him under another name or anything), but it did at least briefly acknowledge that part of the reason someone who's supposed to be a 'true patriot' might betray the British was basically because he was sick of their shit and people like Mycroft just treating his men as cannon fodder.
Also I appreciate that Moriarty doesn't actually die in this film - they try to hang him but he escapes, then you get the ~dramatic~ carriage chase and plunge into the water and some guff about the water being deep and the current sweeping the bodies away but that is nonsense; if Moriarty died there he would have been found (the same in fact as in the canon. People who know far more about these things than me have pointed out that a man's body is not just going to disappear at the Reichenbach Falls, it would be washed up downstream). Ergo, Moriarty survived in it (probably because as I always say Moriarty is actually Death and you can't kill Death). 
Also I'm not sure if they actually realised the significance of this or not but there is definitely something very interesting about them implying the police have beaten a confession out of a suspect (one who we the viewer know isn't even a criminal, he's just an unwitting pawn) while having Moriarty stating he doesn't like unnecessary violence and repeatedly avoiding seriously physically harming people.
So I think I will be keeping this one.

May 2025

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