Film Review: Sherlock Holmes (2009)
Given that Hollywood remakes presently dominate most "worst cinematic disasters of the 21st century" lists, devotees of history's most celebrated detective had every reason to be apprehensive about this latest blockbuster treatment of Sherlock Holmes. The selection of Guy Ritchie as director provided little reassurance—particularly for those who endured Swept Away and recognised that Madonna's former husband and remakes do not, to put it mildly, make compatible bedfellows. Nor did the promotional campaign assuage concerns, with its suggestion of music-video-style action spectacle and speculation about an ultra-revisionist, albeit fashionable, portrayal of Holmes and Watson as a same-sex couple.
Fortunately, after 130 minutes of Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes, one can conclude that fears of yet another Hollywood violation of cultural heritage have proven largely unfounded. The very concept of Holmes as an action hero is not, in fact, terribly distant from Arthur Conan Doyle's original conception, and Ritchie has wisely resisted the temptation to garnish this aspect with flashy MTV-style visual ostentation. Whilst the film contains its fair share of fisticuffs, gunplay, spectacular confrontations and explosions, it functions first and foremost as a detective narrative.
The performances are reasonably solid, though Robert Downey Jr. in the title role falls, naturally, considerably short of the benchmark set by the legendary Jeremy Brett. Victorian London is rendered with considerable realism—perhaps excessively so, given that viewers of the night scenes are all too conscious of the absence of electric lighting in the nineteenth century.
The screenplay largely avoids the revisionist pitfalls common to Hollywood action films set in the Victorian era, such as flirtations with supernatural elements or anachronistic steampunk grotesqueries. Covert references to more modern affairs are virtually nonexistent, save for the inclusion of Freemasons and the mysterious death of a banker named Calvin in the early 1880s. On the other hand, the script stumbles into far more banal errors, notably the forced insertion of a romantic subplot, which is not helped in the slightest by the utter lack of chemistry between Downey and Rachel McAdams as the adventuress Irene Adler. This is compounded by a finale that borrows rather too heavily from Batman Begins and teases a sequel that this film has hardly done enough to merit.
Rating: 6/10
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