(Movie Review)I was slightly disappointed with this movie when I realized it was about Sherlock Holmes fighting the magical powers of the occult. Couldn’t they just let Sherlock Holmes be Sherlock Holmes and outsmart regular criminals without some sort of vast magical occult conspiracy to take over the world?
And then I thought, “Well but what else did I expect from Hollywood?” Arthur Conan Doyle’s short stories where you get the pleasure of observing Holmes outsmart the criminal from his amazing powers of observation and putting together a series of seemingly meaningless clues, may work well as 20 page stories, but probably doesn’t give the spectacular visuals that a blockbuster Hollywood film needs to compete.
(In fact come to think of it, the last Sherlock Holmes movie I saw, “Young Sherlock Holmes”, also involved Sherlock Holmes taking on the occult. And oddly enough, these are the only two Sherlock Holmes movies anyone seems to remember or to watch. I mean I know there are tons of old Sherlock Holmes movies out there if you dig through the archives of Hollywood, and occasionally some of them are run late at night on cable, but I’ve never actually sat down and watched any of these. Have you?)
I was slightly worried the film might attempt to cop-out by invoking the super-natural as an explanation, but to the film’s credit at the end everything had a logical scientific explanation. (Actually some of the more fantastic bits might have been pseudo-science or steam-punk, but close enough.) There weren’t enough clues given to the audience to try and solve the case with Sherlock Holmes, but then the original Conan Doyle stories often worked the same way.
For the same reasons, I don’t really hold it against this film that it made Sherlock Holmes into an action franchise. Like I said, I think Hollywood had to do it to make the film more visually interesting. And I like pop-corn movie, action blockbusters as much as anyone else.
However, if this does become an action movie, it must be judged in part on the quality of its action scenes. And I don’t know, something about these Guy Ritchie action scenes didn’t really do it for me. Hard to put my finger on it exactly. The close-ups, the dizzying quick cuts between shots, the speeding up and then slowing down, all of which made me feel like I wasn’t enjoying the action scenes so much as just struggling to keep track of what was going on.
Also, in theory, I like the casting of Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law as Holmes and Watson. I think giving the parts to actors like these, instead of more stereotypical serious Holmes, is a great way to keep things fresh.
And, in theory, I think it’s good to have them bickering back and forth a little bit as comic relief.
However the way they were constantly arguing about domestic issues like an old married couple wasn’t perhaps quite as funny as it could have been. It also got a bit repetitive.
Link of the Day
On The U.S. Human Rights Record
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