REVIEW: Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes (dir. Guy Ritchie, 2009) ***

reviewed by David Sugarman

OK, confession time: I’ve never seen a Guy Ritchie film all the way through before. Nor have I ever watched a Sherlock Holmes adaptation, or read any of the books. Yes, I know. Ridiculous, but I’m going to pretend that this puts me at an advantage to view the oft-derided Ritchie’s latest movie with an unbiased eye.

The eponymous hero is played here by American actor Robert Downey, Jr., a Holmes of erudite speech, quick mind and a great talent for physical violence, as evinced in the film’s magnificently executed opening sequence and one entertaining but highly unnecessary shirtless bare-knuckle boxing fight. His more-than-able assistant Dr. Watson, typically portrayed as an overweight, bumbling comic figure, is here played by Jude Law, looking rather svelte in a grey suit and dapper moustache. The pre-title sequence involves Holmes and Watson interrupting a supposedly occult murder by Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong), and the rest of the film is concerned with the fall-out of this arrest, as Blackwood is tried, convicted, executed- and apparently resurrected. The duo’s attempts to solve the mystery involve a masonic cult, the House of Lords, inept policemen, bald giants, ginger midgets and a foxy former squeeze of Sherlock’s, Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams).

The resulting film is more Bond than Holmes, but all the more entertaining for it. While one may argue that there is rather more violence than necessary, and that several of the fight scenes are somewhat annoyingly prolonged, the dynamism of the film is hard to resist. Ritchie and his screenwriters, Anthony Peckham and Simon Kinberg, both acknowledge their seemingly irreverent approach to the source material and strive to create a piece of narrative cinema of depth and importance. Despite their efforts, Sherlock Holmes rarely moves above being a highly enjoyable adventure movie. The characters are functional but never fully realised, and none of the supporting characters are particularly memorable. The film’s greatest success is possibly its biggest weakness; Robert Downey, Jr. is electric and charismatic as the troubled Holmes, but quite what these troubles are is a vague and unresolved question that the film either does not want to or forgets to answer. One suspects it may be the latter. Downey, Jr. is the best thing in the film, and with him it works- with a lesser actor, Sherlock Holmes could have been an admirable failure, rather than a very decent action-comedy.