Incoherent story and bad writing wastes good actors and sets

Rating: 2/10 (18 January 2010)

I'll start with the good: the indoor sets are magnificent. Outdoors is great, too, in the narrower alleyways (though it seems like we keep seeing the same horses over and over again), but for wide shots, an excessively CGI-ish feel interfered with my suspension of disbelief. And Robert Downey, Jr. is a magnificent talent, who held my attention when he was on the screen, as he always does, despite the weakness of the character and the writing in this film.
That's as positive as I can be about this movie, on which I have just wasted what felt like a few more hours than the clock said it was.
It was just so very boring and, in the large ways, unfocused. There was no coherent narrative frame, just a lot of random action, bouncing around within the confines of some vague story that seemed almost beside the point, nothing to do with what was happening on the screen most of the time, which seemed to be more about replicating as many action movie clichés as possible. We journeyed through Bond movie clichés, Vietnam movie clichés, buddy comedy clichés, with touches of Indiana Jones and Pirates of the Caribbean.
There was small-scale cleverness in some of the lines. On the larger narrative scale, though, it was tone-deaf. Where we never got to was the film maker using film as a medium to tell me a story that he thought was worth telling.
I suppose if you want mindless action with the magnificent Downey and a soupçon of Doyle, you could do worse. But this movie is not the good stuff, and it will not endure.