“The game is afoot,” exclaimed Hero Fiennes Tiffin from the stage inside London’s Southbank Centre moments before Guy Ritchie’s spin on the classic Sherlock Holmes tales, Young Sherlock, premiered for the first time, worldwide.
The 28-year-old nephew of Ralph and Joseph Fiennes’s playful quip perfectly set the tone for the new Amazon Prime Video series, also starring Irishman Dónal Finn and Colin Firth.
In true Ritchie fashion, the latest offering from the renowned director, who solidified his name behind the scenes of Snatch, starts off with an explosive punch against an unmistakable Cool Britannia aesthetic.
As the one thousand-people-strong audience giggled, gasped and gripped their velvet covered cinema chairs, this generation’s British detective and his infamous nemesis set off in pursuit of a murderer, redefining the history of the iconic 221B Baker Street and giving Benedict Cumberbatch and Andrew Scott a real run for their money.
A zesty plot full of British charm and delicious twists
Injecting a vibrancy into a somewhat ageing tale, the reinvention of the Sherlock Holmes stories by this cast and crew made Baker Street cool again. Transporting audiences back in time to the 1870s, we are introduced to a teenage Sherlock who is up to no good.
His spellbinding intelligence has yet to be channelled and controlled and instead rears its head in a state of anarchism and captivating charm. Played by Hero, the protagonist retains the bones of his famous character but finds himself living and working at Oxford University under the watchful eye of his brother Mycroft Holmes, played by Max Irons.
Whilst there, he crosses paths with the notorious criminal mastermind James Moriarty, played by West End star and The Wheel of Time actor Dónal, who in this version, is a scholarship student and Sherlock’s best friend.
© Daniel Smith/PrimeThe pair find themselves in trouble with the law and in order to clear their names, set out on a tumultuous quest to find out who is murdering prolific professors at the university.
Adding Colin’s sketchy character, Sir Bucephalus Hodge, to the mix and a stunning, yet mysterious, Chinese princess with a killer instinct, things get messy and bloody faster than you can say, “Elementary, my dead Watson.”
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