REVIEW: Star Chemistry Lifts 'Sherlock Holmes'

For those of you expecting what the trailer promised: a bloated, confusing, noisy, headache-inducing Christmas blockbuster weighed down with CGI and barely made watchable by the presence of He Who Makes Everything Better – star Robert Downey Jr. – you’re in for a surprise. Director Guy Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes” might be a tad bloated, somewhat hard to follow, and easily 15 minutes too long, but the director makes this umpteenth cinematic re-imagining of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s intrepid detective his own and delivers a spirited, entertaining, blissfully mindless couple of hours at the movies.

Ritchie’s slovenly Holmes is a long way from Basil Rathbone’s, the actor who played the resident of 221 B Baker Street in 14 films over half as many years starting in 1939, and he’s even further from Doyle’s. The mannered, sophisticated detective is now a borderline recluse who’s utterly dysfunctional when not preoccupied with a case, a glib ladies man and ready action hero who knows how to use his fists. As his physician-partner in crimesolving, Jude Law grabs his best role in years as Holmes’ closest friend and mother hen.

Set in London in the late 1800s, the game afoot does not involve Holmes most famous nemesis Professor Moriarty this time, but instead Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong), a presumably hanged ritual killer and user of the dark arts who might have risen from the dead with a master plan for world domination. Through an influential Gentleman’s Club of fellow occultists, Blackwood all but controls Scotland Yard which leaves only Holmes, Watson and Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams) — a scheming American woman from Holmes’ past with dueling loyalties and a mind just as sharp as her romantic rival’s — to stop him.

The glue that holds the narrative together is not a somewhat convoluted –though smart in places – story, or the tense, suspicious romance between Holmes and Irene (has anyone ever created romantic sparks with McAdams?), but rather the detective’s affectionate friendship with Watson. Contrary to the rumor, there’s no gay subtext at work here. The dynamic between the two adventurers is similar to Hope and Crosby’s “Road” films not a mountain named Brokeback. Holmes knows he’d be lost and lonely without his old friend to guide him, and though he doesn’t know it, Watson would be terribly bored were he to go through with his plans to marry and stake out a life as a run-of-the mill physician.

That’s not to say the film doesn’t employ other charms. There are a couple of terrific actions sequences, one involving a shipyard and the other a slow-motion explosion, and the washed out cinematography does a lot to hide the CGI’d cityscapes and create the perfect wet and foggy atmosphere for such a dark story. But the real plus is Ritchie’s success where it counts. Like Easter eggs for purists, bits and pieces of Doyle’s stories are seamlessly integrated into this affectionate piece of revisionism, and then there’s the genuine star chemistry between Downey Jr. and Law. Much can be forgiven if a film’s central relationship works, and as was the case with “Iron Man,” the blockbuster that made Downey Jr. the superstar comeback story of the decade, it’s hard to imagine how much lesser “Holmes” would be without him.

Fun, frivolous, and bearing no agenda other than pure holiday escapism, Guy Ritchie and Jude Law have officially earned a comeback, Downey Jr. has cemented his, and that promise of a sequel made just before the final fade sounds good to me.

UPDATE: Here are a couple of well-argued articles, one via Instapundit and the second from reader Nate Winchester, claiming the film is closer to Doyle than I gave it credit for. Instapundit’s is the more convincing; the idea being that Doyle gave Holmes certain character traits that “Guy Richie’s re-invention of the Sherlock Holmes film has, at it’s core, a great idea: let’s re-examine the way Doyle might have written about the exact same character in a more permissive, action-oriented era. All the elements are there[.]”

That’s an excellent way to put it. Or as one commenter put it, Ritchie “extrapolated” what would work best for a modern action-adventure. The link from Winchester is to an article written prior to the author seeing the film, but still worth a read.