Steven M. Finkelstein

Well, the holiday season is the second biggest time for movie openings, right after midsummer blockbuster season. All the Oscar bait on display, and also some big-budget eye candy, which is what Guy Ritchie was going for with his loud, flashy Sherlock Holmes, an attempt at rewriting the public perception of the world’s most famous literary detective. Robert Downey Jr. has come a long way, in the past few years, to erasing opinion of him as a talented actor who can’t leave the drugs and partying alone. Now in his early forties, it seems like Downey has his priorities straight, acting being foremost among them, and the movie going public is rewarded because of it. Downey truly is a leading man, with charm, screen presence, and versatility. He can do drama, he can do comedy, and there is no longer any doubt he can do action, as he mixes it up here with former WWE wrestler Kergan and duels with Roderick Strong, here a somewhat forgettable villain in Lord Blackwood. Much of what happens in this first installment is setup for later films, which there almost certainly will be, as ”Sherlock” is doing a brisk business. We get glimpses of a shadowy Professor Moriarty, Holmes’ arch nemesis, who rumor has it will be played by Brad Pitt in part 2. Jude Law rounds out the cast as Watson, not really adding much.

There’s quite a bit in Sherlock Holmes that works. The green-screen created London is a fun place for the characters to mug with each other and strike poses, and there are some really enjoyable action set pieces and sequences. There’s plenty of room for improvement, though. The biggest problem I had was that it’s, well, a Guy Ritchie movie, and that means that things move at a furious pace from the very beginning. Ritchie has everybody running around at about a hundred and ten percent, behind which a very loud, ear-smashing soundtrack is pumping. I’d like things to be taken down just a couple of notches. A great part of the problem for me was pacing. The rest of it came from the fact that I couldn’t really understand what everybody was saying all the time, Downey in particular. Part of it might have been that he’s looking for an English accent that he never quite gets a handle on, and part of it might have been that there are times when he’s delivering expository speeches where he’s speaking too quickly for us to grasp every nuance. If Ritchie had just told everyone to slow down, take a deep breath, and lower their heart rate, and ours, before starting every scene, I think the movie would have been helped immeasurably for it. Also, I didn’t so much care for the supposedly witty banter between Holmes and Watson. In the written stories, it was always point and counterpoint between the two, yin and yang. Here, it’s more like yang and yang. Law, as Watson, seems to be just a watered-down version of Holmes himself, possessing some of his abilities as a detective, but just being one or two paces behind him in terms of deductive prowess. I wanted to see more of a difference between them, though they are at least at odds over Holmes’ slovenly habits…that part they got right.

All in all, there’s more here to like than not to. Everything is wrapped up in a satisfactory manner, with a speech by Holmes in the closing minutes neatly tying up any loose ends that had been bothering me. There were no gaping holes left in the plot, and I find that I do want to see the next installment, so this one did its job. It also convincingly landed Downy at the helm of a second action franchise after Iron Man, part 2 of which is due out this coming summer. With an Iron Man film and a Sherlock Holmes film out every other year, he’s suddenly a box office god rivaled by few. What I would advise Ritchie to do the next time out is to have everybody brush up on their English accents, slow things down a couple of clicks, and focus a bit more on actual character development and well, um, detection. That is, after all, what Holmes is all about, not bare knuckle boxing, and that’s what I’d like to see a bit more of. I know we’re trying to appeal to kids growing up in an age where they’d rather see Holmes pull out an M-16 and start mowing people down, but let’s try to preserve the integrity of the source material a little bit. Holmes is one of the most complex literary figures from history. I’d like to see more of that complexity and less running around and things exploding in part 2. But it’s Hollywood, and it’s Guy Ritchie with the biggest budget available to him he’s ever had, so there’s probably not much chance of that. My rating: 6/10.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 at 6:50 pm and is filed under Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.