Pretty good

Rating: 8/10 (14 January 2010)

Well, here's a strange thing. Diamond geezer director Guy Ritchie, who has struggled to repeat the critical and commercial success of diamond geezer London crime movie Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, gets to direct a Hollywood blockbuster, complete with a couple of big names and special effects coming out the old wazoo. Not something I would have predicted, but there you go. So what's it like? Rather good fun, actually. It's a solid story, with lots of action, lots of detectiving, a fair amount of humour, and bags of period feel (albeit tempered with some knowing anachronisms, especially in the dialogue). At the heart of it is the relationship between Downey's Holmes and Law's Watson (a good deal ballsier than any Watson I have seen elsewhere, a diamond geezer in fact), which is greatly assisted by the genuine chemistry between the two actors. The script is entertaining, the two principals give very good performances, and they are assisted by solid support from Mark Strong (always first rate) and Eddie Marsan. Only Rachel McAdams fails to engage, but perhaps that's just me.
The effects budget has gone towards creating a very authentic looking Victorian London (although I can't help thinking that Baker Street, where I used to live, would have been wider than that back in Victorian times).
I have only two reservations. One, Downey's accent never convinced me for a second: I was always aware that this was someone doing an accent, not that it was Holmes' natural way of speaking. And, two, I thought that some of the music was ear-manglingly awful. The Irish jig and gypsy dance-type pieces not only did not fit particularly well in the sequences they were applied to, and were so intrusive that they threatened to pull me out of the movie.
Apart from that, the movie was hugely enjoyable.