A very simple (and boring) plot...

Rating: 1/10 (1 February 2010)

Many people complains about the plot being confusing, but I found it very simple: Two ninjas, Sherlock and Watson (the former said to be very clever) have a fight each five minutes of the film. In-between fights they try to solve a very difficult case about a bad guy (Lord Blackwood) that, as Count Dracula, has the power to get into the minds of the people and make them cause riots and protests everywhere in Victorian London. Although the bad guy’s ambitions are merely political, he also murders women as a hobby and that’s why he is captured by the two ninjas, then prosecuted and finally hanged.
Many people go to see the execution, but nobody (not even the clever ninja) notes that the rope from which the bad guy hangs stays loose around his neck. The other ninja, said to be a physician, takes the pulse of the corpse directly on the neck, and realizes that the rope didn’t leave any mark whatsoever in the dead guy’s neck. Admired by how soft these new ropes are, he says nothing and declares him dead.
The bad guy wasn’t dead, but he was buried the same under big blocks of granite. This was a very hard task because these blocks were actually very small pieces glued together lightly so that the bad guy could break them from the inside of his grave and it must have required quite a lot of people to put these fragile blocks in place so delicately as not to unglue them. Fortunately for the bad guy no one working at the cemetery noticed this.
The film goes on very slowly after that. Anything they investigate is immediately followed by a long fight.
Very often Conan Doyle writes about cases that although they look supernatural at the beginning, a sound and rational explanation is provided at the end.
Guy Ritchie decides to change this tedious scheme, so that a crescendo is built till the last frame. To achieve this Guy Ritchie applies the rule that if a case looks supernatural, the explanation should be more supernatural than the case itself.
So, at the end, we are faced with magical substances (that couldn’t be found till now even in the Pandora moon) like a kind of clear, odorless liquid, that people take as water, which ignites readily and violently with just a spark, distilled cyanhydric acid that kills much better than the relatively pure counterpart so easy to obtain, an antidote thanks to which you can breathe hydrogen cyanide with no ill effects, small sized remote controls made in 1880, and many, many more. No ridicule is spared in explaining what has happened and how.
Such a display of fantasy for nothing; at the end the clever ninja cannot explain how the bad guy managed to get into the minds of the people and organize riots telepathically. Maybe there was also a magical gas that was released by the bad guy and caused this, but unfortunately this is not shown in the film.