Never Gonna Give You Up

“Jim…” Spock cautiously reached out to him as though he was still drifting in the space between one universe and another, and a touch might somehow be enough to tether him.

Jim put his hand over Spock’s, a certain vulnerability beneath his wry smile. “There was nothing, not even the stars.”

Spock held onto Jim’s hand as though, illogically, holding onto him now could make up for having not been there when he was adrift, alone in a whole universe.

“It isn’t that I had no need for your final orders but that to see you and to hear your voice…”

The beginning is a bit silly and there's a bit of a love triangle, but Raffles and Bunny's relationship ends up being pretty good. And it perfectly captures how irresistible Raffles is, as even the detective who was pursuing him concludes, "Well, I'm deucedly glad he escaped! He's splendid!"

Since the movie is in the public domain, the whole thing is available on Wikipedia (which is the best quality version of the film I found):

It's a shame Watson isn't involved in the actual plot, but you do at least really get the feeling that they're going out of their way to spend time together because they like each other, which is sweet, and they have a surprising amount of chemistry for how little screen time Watson has.

The plot feels like a slightly incoherent prototype for a very Hollywood take on Sherlock Holmes: of course it's got Moriarty as essentially a mob boss, though he doesn't really accomplish anything, and there's a character based on Irene Alder, who of course is Holmes's love interest. Watson is mostly relegated to a fun cameo, and Holmes himself feels a bit like an early action hero at times with how seriously he takes everything.

I appreciate that they at least renamed the Irene Adler expy to Alice Faulkner, because she's only really vaguely inspired by Irene Adler. Presumably to make her a more "suitable" love interest, it's Alice's sister who had a relationship with the Prince and then tragically died of a broken heart. Then, presumably to make Holmes look more heroic in comparison, some con artists are also after her sister's letters to the Prince and hold Alice against her will.

However, they clearly felt they had to keep Holmes's trick of using a fire to get Irene Adler to reveal where the portrait is hidden, so Holmes fakes a fire instead of actually rescuing Alice from the con artists, even though he knows she's being held against her will, which feels as strange as it sounds, especially when they go out of their way to make him a gentleman about the letters after he finds them.

Then, at the end, Holmes again reluctantly tricks Alice into giving up her letters to the Prince, even though part of the point of the original story was that the Prince was in the wrong and that Irene Adler deserved to keep her photograph. It's not clear why Alice's case is any different, especially since this is immediately followed by a romantic moment between Holmes and Alice, which would have made way more sense if he had nobly decided to turn away the Prince, earning her trust.

Moriarty's role is just as strange; though he gets a lot of screen time, he doesn't really effect much. He visits Holmes, like in the The Final Problem, but even he doesn't seem to know what he's trying to accomplish with the visit. There's a long sequence about setting up a death trap that the heroes never even end up being threatened with. And he's finally defeated because he disguises himself as a cabby so that Holmes can catch him by asking for help with his bags, like at the end of A Study in Scarlet, which doesn't really make sense out of context.

Apparently someone wanted to show off some effects because Holmes summons Watson via an electronic message system that only shows up in this one scene, and Watson gets down into the sitting room via a secret elevator instead of just taking the stairs. Not to mention that this Watson looks like the epitome of a 19th century German doctor.

“I’d offer to carry you the whole way, but you clearly have stamina to spare,” Jamie said silently as Spock made herself comfortable.

“I’m adapted to a significantly thinner atmosphere.” Spock’s answer echoed dryly in Jamie’s mind, but she had the impression Spock was secretly pleased.

“An artificial atmosphere?” Jamie said as she jogged across the schoolyard; she could only assume that such an advanced space-faring civilization would of course have moved on to colonizing and perhaps even terraforming other planets.

“No, Vulcan is not an empire; it does not aim to expand or colonize.” Spock seemed somewhat affronted but not seriously offended.

“My mistake,” Jamie said with an easy smile as she pushed open the doors to the school

In this case, the audience knows from the start, but it got me thinking that would be a really fun trick for an adaptation to play that the stories couldn't because they're tied to Watson's perspective: Holmes shows up and seems to be doing his thing as usual, maybe there's something a little weird about him, but that's just Holmes for you. And then halfway through, a second Holmes appears and after much ado, it turns out the first Holmes was actually the antagonist in disguise!

The star of the show is really the antagonist, who feels a bit more like a Bond or Batman villain with a penchant for explosives and a cottage with a chair out of Sweeney Todd that drops whoever's sitting in it into a chute below. He also spends most of the movie pretending to be Holmes, and the actor really looks the part, even more so than the one actually playing Holmes.

As it's in the public domain, the whole movie is on Youtube (this is the best version I could find):