![]() It was also never explained who or what Sherlock Holmes was supposed to be: rather than a sophisticated genius, Downey comes off as a very lucky hard case who grew up reading stories featuring his character. Indeed, I found that the film’s biggest mysteries didn’t involve the sinister, back-from-the-dead Lord Blackwood ( Mark Strong), or the motives of erstwhile femme fatale Irene Adler ( Rachel McAdams) my curiosity lay in how Holmes and Watson could stand to be friends, much less work together. They’re like a Masterpiece Theatre version of the Jersey Shore housemates, who occasionally solve crimes. They share a London apartment, which they have trouble maintaining due to Watson’s gambling problem and Holmes’ propensity for blowing holes in the walls. ![]() Watson ( Jude Law) are much younger-at least they act like it. For one thing, he and his faithful assistant, Dr. This is a much different take on the Holmes character than previous incarnations. Like Avatar, I knew I was in trouble less than ten minutes into this picture I was honestly compelled to leave. And considering the talent on and off the screen, that had to have been a greater feat than all the technical wizardry in Avatar. It manages to wholly miss the point and promise of a good mystery. It reduces literature’s greatest detective to a borderline-autistic, drunken brawler.ģ. It evokes Robert Downey Jr.’s least interesting performance since his re-emergence as an A-list actor.Ģ. But what a curious way to do it.Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes accomplishes several astonishing things:ġ. By withdrawing Holmes's cocaine, Ritchie has, I suppose, given his own career a shot in the arm. Holmes's drug taking is airbrushed out of the picture he takes nothing stronger than claret. And it is, indeed, the first of Ritchie's films not to get an R rating in the US. Small wonder: introducing the film, producer Joel Silver proudly billed it as a family movie, a Christmas treat. Watson's big dilemma – whether to quit his life with Holmes for marriage to lovely Mary (Kelly Reilly, underused) has, at heart, all the depth of a Wham! song. ![]() With their natty suits and canes, their opera ticket tiffs and their campy domesticity Downey Jr and Law have the faint look, at times, of Gilbert and George.īut it's a hollow attempt at modernisation, and quickly grows dull. His one stab at the latter appears to have been the elevation of the Holmes/Watson relationship from clubby friendship (with homoerotic undertones) to full-blown bromance. His self-disbelief may be well-founded but competing intentions cancel each other out and Ritchie ends up picking up points neither for authenticity nor fashionable reinvention. ![]() This muddle of genres reflects a collapse of confidence in his ability to deliver anything. Is it a cool satire on Victorian seriousness? A thriller? A comedy? At least in the past Ritchie knew what he was making, even it wasn't always much good. Sherlock Holmes baffles in all the wrong ways. The disguises hardly wow, the wit fails to sparkle and the imagery tends to clod (there's an especially over-used crow). This Holmes's expertise would struggle to impress the cops at Sun Hill. All deductive insight here is in fact, rather feeble. This mammoth scale rather takes away from the minute pleasures of Holmes's sleuthery. An Aleister Crowley-style Satanist (Ritchie regular Mark Strong, with a Bela Lugosi hairdo) has cooked up a Da Vinci Code-sized plot involving coming back from the dead, infiltrating parliament and taking over the world. While Arthur Conan Doyle set his hero small, neat conundrums, this Holmes has the whole world to save. The case they're given to solve is a non-canonical international emergency. But they're both a pain: the former a cartoon with darting eyes rather than a brain, the latter just a blank. Holmes is played with boggle-eyed haminess by Robert Downey Jr while Jude Law is Watson – inspired casting at first glance: his weirdly boring aura superficially lending itself to the role. It's just a film that makes you hanker after Ritchie's back catalogue. Good news for those Holmes purists appalled by the prospect of literature's most cerebral sleuth getting a geezer makeover, but bad news for the rest of us: Sherlock Holmes isn't even a magnificent mistake.
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