Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
12/27/09
I've read and loved every
word Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about the brilliant Consulting Detective
Sherlock Holmes and his faithful assistant Dr. Watson, and while I've enjoyed
some of the movie and TV adaptations, something has always nagged at me.
The world Doyle created seemed somehow more alive with danger and madness
than the orderly, polite Baker Streets of Basil Rathbone or Jeremy Brett's
detectives. To me, the fascination of Holmes is in his bizarre, needy
and quite possibly bipolar personality, something that actually made it
to the screen most accurately in the Holmes-inspired person of House,
M.D.'s Dr. Gregory House. Until now. Guy Ritchie has found
the Sherlock Holmes I saw when I read the stories: Robert Downey
Jr., who does the honors in a new blockbuster designed specifically for
people who filtered the master of deduction through a prism of late-20th
century narrative styles. Sherlock Holmes is large-scale and
action-packed, but it holds to Doyle's vision (or at least my vision of
it) surprisingly well. The plot is entertaining enough, though it's
really just blockbuster filler. But the chance to visit a 221B Baker
Street so messy and alive was a true delight.
Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey
Jr.) and Dr. Watson (Jude Law) thwart the plans of occultist multiple murderer
Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong), and he is sentenced to hang. This is
to be their final case together, as Watson plans to move out of the house
they share on Baker Street and propose to his girlfriend Mary (Kelly Reilly).
Holmes is jealous, unable to accept the coming changes, and deep in his
usual between-cases melancholy when opportunity knocks: Blackwood
summons him on the eve of his execution with an ominous threat about coming
horrors. And after his hanging, when Watson himself declared him
dead, Blackwood's mausoleum is found opened from the inside, with another
man's body in his place. It just happens that this is the same man
Holmes' old rival Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams) had just hired him to find.
Irene is taking her marching orders from a mysterious Professor with an
interest in Blackwood's plans, and a trail of clues stretches out before
Holmes that points to resurrection, supernatural powers, and a plot to
bring the world to its knees. Can Sherlock Holmes' genius thwart
the grand design of a man who may not even be human?
Much has been made of the
modernizing and rebooting of Doyle's iconic character in Sherlock Holmes,
but truth be told, the primary thing Ritchie and his writers (Michael Robert
Johnson, Anthony Peckham, Simon Kinberg and Lionel Wigram) have done
is to blow away the dust of generations of other adaptations. Yes,
Downey Jr's Holmes boxes and uses the martial arts, but Doyle referred
to both as part of his master detective's skill set in the original stories,
which were hardly bereft of action. And the Case of the Resurrected
Lord is still a puzzle only a man of Holmes' mastery of observation and
encyclopedic knowledge could hope to solve. As usual, the clues are
in plain sight, but their connections draw upon the botany, cultures and
sciences of turn-of-the-century locations throughout Europe and Asia.
In short, good luck solving the case, but once it's solved, I felt satisfied
that the writers had played fair, and also that the solution fit well within
Holmes' world.
Liberties have been taken,
of course, juggling the timelines of Holmes, Watson, Mary, Adler and that
mysterious Professor to suit its' purposes, but in the process the movie
touches upon almost every significant relationship within the Holmes universe.
I was always interested in the Holmes/Watson/Mary quasi-triangle, which
is a minor element of the stories but is allowed a richer hashing-out here,
and of course fans long-fascinated with Holmes' love/hate relationship
with “the woman” Irene Adler get to examine it in more detail without crossing
the line into true romance. The script is also peppered with clever
dialog lifts from the stories, in some cases assigned to other characters
or contexts. Sherlock Holmes is not a filming of any particular
Doyle story, but rather a sort of tossing of the entire Cannon into a blender.
The literal-minded will blanch, but those of us raised on a culture of
reference and allusion will geek out.
As I mentioned earlier, Downey
Jr. is just about perfect as Holmes. Sloppy, tortured, brilliant
and brave, he hits every part of the detective's complex personality and
makes it his own. When he was cast, I thought no other actor could
be as well-suited to the role, and I was right. Ritchie does a great
job channeling his trademark cinematic energy into Holmes' process, showing
him thinking through fights before they occur in a sort of “genuis-cam”,
and staging a bravura sequence where he puts together one of his trademark
disguises from found objects while pursuing Irene down an alley.
Not surprisingly, Holmes' drug use didn't make the cut in this PG-13 adaptation,
but he's certainly got enough self-destructive habits to not feel watered-down.
Watson, always a tougher
fellow on the page than he was ever allowed to be on-screen (except, perhaps
in the delightful Without a Clue, where Ben Kingley's Doctor was
depicted as the real brains of the operation), but Jude Law corrects that
imbalance with a vengeance. The Holmes/Watson relationship here is
a bit feistier than the one on the page, but that's a fair concession to
changing times, and the core of their mutual trust and loyalty is only
enhanced by a little well-placed bickering. McAdams nicely captures
Adler's sneaky charm, and Reilly does a splendid job holding her own as
the woman forced to compete with Holmes for Watson's heart. Eddie
Marsan gets a few nice scenes as Inspector Lestrade, including a long-overdue
chance to belt Holmes for all those insults. The always-reliable
Strong gets the job done as the guest villain, while Hans Matheson is nicely
hissable as the delightfully-named Lord Coward.
The impressive production
does a great job of recreating late 1800's London, including a nifty big
finish atop the under-construction Tower Bridge. In general, Sherlock
Holmes gives modern audiences all they could ask for from the first
big-screen adventure of Doyle's greatest creation in decades. It
may not be chapter and verse, but this movie clearly loves Sherlock Holmes,
Dr. Watson and friends, and that's more than enough for me. It's
hard to remember the last movie that wasn't part of a trilogy to campaign
so aggressively for its sequel (I did mention a certain Professor lurking
behind the scenes, right?): it's certainly got my vote. |
