Uninteresting, Average Mystery That Doesn't Always Make Sense

Rating: 3/10 (25 December 2015)

Having watched this movie's sequel and enjoying it I decided that I really should give the first one a watch. Why I watched the second one first is unknown to me, but I'm not sure how much I would want to re-watch it after witnessing this.
The plot is average. Crazy man wants to take over the world/immediate area/habitat/country and it's up to Sherlock Holmes and his trusty Watson to stop him. That would be all fine and dandy if the movie didn't start at the end of the conflict, then continue with it for the rest of the movie and constantly make references to the conflict that we never got to witness because the movie started with the end of it. Now that's not the only reason why I didn't like this movie, but it would have been nice if we could have had a movie about that, then a second movie for afterwards, and then have the third movie be Game of Shadows instead. It'd make a nice little trilogy. But I guess that was too hard. Anyway, the plot wasn't horribly original and while I liked, for the most part, the bad guy and his tricks, the rest of the movie was so unappealing that it was difficult to enjoy any part of it.
The characters were fine. I already knew that Sherlock was a quirky character who just did whatever he wanted while Watson was more official, so it really just developed that. We never went any further into the characters, which is perfectly fine. The female character, Irene, only came in when it the conditions were perfect or she needed saving or someone else needed saving, so I didn't care about her because she just came and went as she pleased without doing a whole heck of a lot.
Something that really frustrated me was the fact that the audience never had to chance to think about the case as if progressed. You were left with Sherlock staring at random objects that didn't seem to serve any purpose until the very end of the movie. At the end there's no excited 'A-ha!' or 'Eureka!' moment. He just explains it all very quickly and you just look at the screen and think 'Oh, okay. Cool'. We never get to hear his thought processes throughout the movie so a lot of his explanations come off as far fetched over amazing. Now I understand that that's just part of his character, but maybe that just means that Sherlock Holmes isn't an effectively entertaining character is mystery stories.
Overall Sherlock Holmes is just disappointing. Other than the antagonist and his methods, the movie is very lackluster and poorly done, and even the antagonist isn't horribly original himself. It was boring (even during a lot of the action sequences), unoriginal, and just an overall waste of time if you ask me. In the end I wouldn't recommend Sherlock Holmes to anyone.