SHERLOCK HOLMES

Rating: 4

Guy Ritchie’s approach to the SHERLOCK HOLMES is predictably, but delightfully, bombastic. Which is not to say that this lushly produced, stylishly realized film is not perfectly entertaining. A clever script that is not quite as sharp as it should be is redeemed by a pair of superb performances by Robert Downey, Jr, as the world’s first consulting detective, and Jude Law as his prim yet refreshingly rakish sidekick, Dr. Watson.
Bombastic is also an apt description of this incarnation of Holmes. Far from the fastidiousness of earlier versions, this Holmes’ brilliance has no room for the particulars of fashion, nor, according to this incarnation of Watson, hygiene. While the plot involves black magic and secret cults plotting to take over the world in ways more overt than previously utilized, the real story is the tension between Holmes and Watson, played to the hilt by Downey and Law.
Watson is on the verge of marriage to the lovely Mary Morstan (Kelly Reilly), much to Holmes’ chagrin. Not that the relationship between the two has been smooth. Holmes’ eccentricities and indifference to the niceties of polite society, or society at all for that matter, have put a crimp in Watson’s medical practice and sorely tried his patience as well as his patients. Watson’s penchant for gambling hasn’t helped, either, nor has Holmes’ smugness on the point. And yet, Holmes has brought out the mother hen, so to speak, in Watson, and in Watson, Holmes has found the tough love he needs to keep him at least partially in touch with the outside world. That they both have a serious yen for the adventure that comes of being Sherlock Holmes is self-evident.
They bicker with the film’s best dialogue, gently but firmly pushing each other’s buttons while never quite convincing each other, or the audience, that they will be going their separate ways. As for the villain of the piece, he’s Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong) a smoothly sinister mage with patent-leather hair and a mesmerizing stare, who seems to have risen from the dead even after Dr. Watson pronounced him thoroughly deceased. The resulting mayhem and string of post-mortem murders by Blackwood is a convenient excuse for ginger-haired midgets to turn up in unexpected places, unholy ceremonies to take place, even more unholy scientific experiments to be performed, and a series of gorgeously complicated brushes with death by our heroes. Plus, more than a brush with The Woman, which is to say the only woman for whom Holmes ever pined, and by whom he was outsmarted. Twice. That would be Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams) who sashays through the plot for reasons as complicated and as seductive as her exuberant eye-shadow and gently swaying bustle.
For purists, there is the glaring deviation from the canon about Mary Morstan’s backstory, but then again, purists seeking the canon are on a fool’s errand here. While the recreation of Holmes’ London is meticulous, this is Downey’s Holmes, scathingly brilliant, immoderately vain, but with a core of sadness at the isolation it brings him, making his attachment to Watson all the more urgent. Far from a caricature, this is a Holmes that is satisfyingly complex and viscerally physical, yet with human weaknesses that enhance, rather than detract, from that complexity. As for Law, he makes Watson less a sounding board for Holmes than a closet buccaneer in his own right, though one with a more conventional appetite for life. It’s a symbiotic relationship with its own piquant charm, Holmes soothing his boredom by serenading houseflies in order to study the effects, and Watson releasing them in order to bring Holmes back to reality, or as close as that’s ever going to happen.
SHERLOCK HOLMES spares no expense, nor any imagination, as it sends the icon out on a series of cliffhangers, some more literal than others, saving western civilization and coming to terms with the new phase of his partnership with Watson. Rollicking, irreverent, and yet true to the spirit, if not the letter, of the Holmsian canon, this is a version of Holmes that finds the perfect balance between cerebral and spectacle.