MOVIE REVIEW: Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes Enfuses New Life in Old Franchise
Reviewed by David M. Kinchen
Forget the argument about the “traditional” portrayal of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s master detective Sherlock Holmes: Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, starring Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes and Jude Law as Dr. John H. Watson brings new life to the old franchise.
After all, there have been about 200 movies about the world’s most famous fictional detective, so who’s to say what is traditional and what isn’t. Many purists point to the late Jeremy Brett’s British television portrayal as the best of the traditional ones. Ritchie benefits from an excellent writing team: Lionel Wigram and Michael Robert Johnson for the screen story and Johnson, Anthony Peckham and Simon Kinberg for the screenplay.
Ritchie (Rocknrolla, Snatch, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) directs with his usual hectic pace, with stop action, plenty of explanatory flashbacks and relentless music by Hans Zimmer, the king of relentless movie scores.
Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes is enhanced by the excellent casting choices of Mark Strong as the villain Lord Blackwood and Rachel McAdams as Irene Adler, whose loyalties are divided throughout the movie; you never know when she’s working for Blackwood and when she’s helping out Holmes and Watson. I’m glad McAdams used a North American accent — she’s Canadian — for Adler. In the one Conan Doyle story that Adler actually appears, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” she’s described as an opera singer from New Jersey.
Speaking of accents, Downey’s British accent is acceptable and he maintains it throughout the movie. Downey is a Holmes of action, participating in bare knuckle boxing matches and is adept at martial arts. His Holmes is the messy Oscar Madison to Watson’s neat and fussy Felix Unger in an “Odd Couple” interchange between the detective and the about to be married Watson.
The plot is not based on any one of the 56 short stories and four novels of the canon, but includes elements of many of them as serial killer Lord Blackwood attempts to use magic and the infiltration of a masonic/illuminati type organization to engineer a putsch against the British government. Blackwood echoes Adolf Hitler in a reference to his dream of a millennium long government, similar to Hitler’s goal of a “Thousand-Year Reich.”
Summing up, Sherlock Holmes (128 minutes, PG-13, my rating 3-1/2 out of 4 stars) is the most entertaining version since Billy Wilder’s 1970 The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes which had an hour cut from its original shooting script. There is sure to be a sequel, as it’s set up at the end of the film by the Irene Adler character.
Word of mouth and fans of Ritchie’s films drove the Christmas Day opening box office total of Sherlock Holmes to $24.9 million, compared to the $23.6 million Christmas take for Avatar. I’m guessing Sherlock Holmes will gross at least $200 million.
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