"In another life, Mr Holmes, you would have made a great criminal"

Rating: 7/10 (22 January 2010)

I'm a huge Sherlock Holmes fan; not quite enough to be a Baker Street Irregular, but I consider Arthur Conan Doyle's short stories to be among the best entertainment that literature has to offer, and Holmes to be one of the medium's most memorable creations. Upon hearing that Guy Ritchie would helm the latest Sherlock Holmes adaptation, my first reaction was that of trepidation. Though I did enjoy 'Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998)' and 'Snatch (2000),' I couldn't quite see Ritchie's style being suitable for the material. My concerns were well- grounded, but overstated. 'Sherlock Holmes (2009)' has extremely little to do with Conan Doyle's original prose, but, considered simply as an action movie set in the nineteenth century, the film manages to be a lot of fun. After all, Holmes has seen worse injustices bestowed upon him: let's not forget that Basil Rathbone's Universal films were set in the modern day, and recast Holmes as a Nazi-fighting spy!
The year is 1891, and London lives in fear. Aristocrat Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong) has been murdering women in grotesque rituals of human sacrifice. Even following his capture by Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey, Jr.) and Dr Watson (Jude Law), the sinister Blackwood pledges to return, even after death, to continue his work. Uncharacteristically for a Sherlock Holmes story, Ritchie's film relies very strongly on a sense of the supernatural: its screenplay, to me, more closely resembled Agatha Christie's "The Pale Horse," in which supernatural happenings are cunningly simulated by purely rational means. This clever device may be deliberately denouncing Conan Doyle's interest in spiritualism, which, in his declining years, gained prominence in such novels as "The Land of Mist (1926)." Despite the protests of close friend Harry Houdini, Conan Doyle remained a vocal exponent of spiritualism for the remainder of his life. Perhaps the great author, as Holmes might have suggested, should have taken greater note of the details.