proof that we'll follow Robert Downey Jr anywhere

Rating: 3/10 (27 December 2009)

Guy Ritchie doesn't make movies, he makes delivery systems for stupidity. Loud, empty, aggressively uninteresting, a Guy Ritchie movie is almost as ugly as Christmas in a dorm room and just as depressing. At least in your dorm, you could make phone calls home and maybe read a book. In a Guy Ritchie movie, all you can do is sleep. And you can't even do that unless you bring earplugs.
Ritchie diligently repeats every piece of information - vital, moderately important, irrelevant - as if convinced the audience shares his I.Q. deficit. Redundancy is a fond memory in his world: dead horses at least make a different noise when beaten in different locations. Shake a stick at Guy Ritchie and you get the same reaction every time, a hollow thud resonating in a void. A very loud hollow thud.
Downey is fine, but he's been better in better comic books. Jude Law is very good, but other than SLEUTH, when was he not? And the great wasteland of this SHERLOCK, and of any Guy Ritchie product, is populated by excellent supporting players brought to mediocrity. Ritchie has succeeded in failing to make Mark Strong an exciting screen presence, a feat even Ridley Scott couldn't accomplish; the lovely Rachel McAdams, who has proved her ability in drama and comedy, here can't even manifest the basic facial expressions of the pantomime: fear? Nope. Passion? Uh-uh. Boredom? Well, we're together on that one.
Yes, I've read every one of the Conan Doyle stories, and yes, there's ample support for Holmes as a pugilist, a narcissist, an adrenaline junkie. What I have failed to find any previous evidence of is Holmes as a soporific. Guy Ritchie has performed a sort of Christmas miracle by making one of the great dynamic intellectuals of literature into a dull, third rate professor of history.
If you're going to make a movie with more than five set pieces, you'd do well to realize you're making an action movie. And if you're making an action movie, it behooves you to ensure that the audience hasn't seen every one of the fights before, not only in countless other movies but in THIS one! What a breakthrough, Guy. Watching one of your movies is like regurgitating a piece of gristle. Madonna, mediocrity that she is, was as close as you ever got to significance.