a rollicking good time with a sophisticated blockbuster by Ritchie & company

Rating: 7/10 (27 December 2009)

Sherlock Holmes has been done and revisited and re-baked so many times one wonder what else could be done with it (my first exposure wasn't even to Holmes directly but through Disney's Great Mouse Detective). So it was about time, I suppose, that Hollywood would tackle this as any other franchise and make it into a big smashing action movie... which sounds wrong, of course, as Holmes and Watson's adventures aren't meant to have super elaborate action set pieces or fights, and are more about the figuring-out of things and Holmes' dry wit and frustrating manner as a cocaine addict and eccentric personality. But luckily Guy Ritchie, making his first real step into a big studio situation (not his crime movies or misguided Madonna-inspired pics) is a success on a basic level: he gets audiences interested in the Sherlock Holmes detective story first, as well as the rapport between Holmes and Watson, and then lays in his own touches to the material.
It's another of those stories that, oddly enough like Great Mouse Detective, is as simple a plan as a villain's plot could get: take over England. In this case we have Lord Blackwood (nefariously cold performance from Mark Strong), who it would appear has been practicing dark magic, and has killed five people. He's hanged, but it also appears that he has risen from the grave and puts forth a dastardly plot to "change the course of the world", as a villain like him would put it so bluntly, and it's up to Holmes to stop him. While figuring out what's going on in the story, the detective work of it all, is fascinating, it's not entirely the true draw of the film. If there's any invention in the plot it's in the ways that Blackwood uses confounded technology from a turn of the 20th century period that works on a level that's fresh for 2009 audiences.
No, it's Robert Downey Jr and, also, Jude Law as Holmes and Watson, watching them on screen interacting with each other, interacting with others, and figuring out what's going to happen next (mostly this is Holmes, and nine times out of them he figures it out in an instant and spends most of his time explaining it away, accompanied by visuals), that makes it most compelling. Downey couldn't be more equipped to play a character like this, and like Iron Man it's a character that has more nuance and more going on under the surface than we might think looking at him. There's snark, there's sarcasm, there's a bad-ass bravura and a sense of entitlement to both characters, but in Holmes we see Downey (minus the coke habit of the original Doyle creation for a PG-13 rated film) tackle this iconic figure with the intelligence and grace found in previous versions, but his own spin on it as well. And Law is up to the challenge of Watson, even if, arguably, the roles could be reversed for the stars and played just as well.
The action set-pieces are good... not always terribly original (oh, big guy vs. normal sized guy, haven't seen that before), and the final confrontation on the scaffolding of the bridge may go on a tad too long with the exposition. But all in all Ritchie gives a lot of the fights and action real excitement and energy; my favorite was Holmes, in an act of clairvoyance for the audience's sake, shows what he'll do in slow-motion and narration to an opponent in a bare-knuckle brawl, and then just does it in regular-speed film. It's a creative angle on it without going too predictable. Oh, and did I mention the music is just about perfect here? Listening to the few songs, and most notably the old-time charged Hans Zimmer score, adds pep and inspiration to a lot of scenes, the twang of the guitar or violins and other instruments usual to find in a blockbuster, but a welcome treat.
Sherlock Holmes is fun times, a kind of one-shot graphic novel turned into a movie that deviates from prior times with the books and stories, and still works as entertainment. It's not high-art. It's Robert Downey Jr. smoking a pipe, looking joyfully mad, and a stylish (and satisfying) revamp on Victorian-era London. 7.5/10