Four stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for violence, dramatic intensity and brief sensuality
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.30.09
Buy DVD: Sherlock Holmes
• Buy Blu-Ray: Sherlock Holmes [Blu-ray]
Arthur Conan Doyle purists likely will sputter and take solace in the canonical 56 short stories and four novels, while more aggressive members of various Baker Street Irregulars societies will pen waspish editorials in their newsletters, but that won't change the facts: Director Guy Ritchie's audacious re-imagining of the world's most famous consulting detective is impressively realized.
And a lot of fun.
 |
| Watson (Jude Law, left) and Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.), relaxing in their digs at 221 B Baker Street, ponder a particularly devilish detail in a case that grows weirder -- and possibly more supernatural -- by the day. |
Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes — with a stylish original script by Michael Robert Johnson, Anthony Peckham, Simon Kinberg and Lionel Wigram — isn't even close to being the most outré send-up of Holmes and his faithful companion, Dr. Watson; half a dozen earlier projects could vie for that title (my vote for the most wretched being the 1977 Dudley Moore/Peter Cook version of The Hound of the Baskervilles
, easily one of the worst movies ever unleashed on an unsuspecting public). Ritchie is, it therefore must be said, being pilloried both unnecessarily and unfairly. True, this new Sherlock Holmes owes much to co-producer Joel Silver's bombastic, testosterone-fueled school of filmmaking; the frequent bouts of fisticuffs border on the bone-shattering absurd, and at least one of the more vicious death-traps seems to have escaped from the Saw horror franchise.
But the sense and mood of Doyle's brooding detective, along with his environment, are spot-on. Production designer Sarah Greenwood (Atonement
, Pride and Prejudice
) has done a phenomenal job of re-creating Victorian London, albeit with considerable assistance from the special-effects team that — as just one example — fills the Thames with meticulously authentic 19th century water craft. Elsewhere, the half-constructed Tower Bridge looms with exposed steel frames and wooden walkways across that same mighty river: an imposing set piece that we just know will figure prominently in this story's climax.
Holmes' cluttered lodgings at 221 B Baker Street are brought to life with similar fidelity to Doyle's original vision. While I couldn't spot the detective's correspondence stuck to the fireplace mantel with an oversized knife, I did note the glass-covered hive of bees, phrenology charts, anatomical drawings, chemical retorts and sagging piles of dog-eared books and scattered newspapers.
And if Robert Downey Jr.'s Holmes combats the frustration of boredom with bare-knuckle boxing, as opposed to a seven-percent solution of cocaine, that seems a minor quibble; either way, the man remains the cheerful misogynist and raging manic depressive that we all know and love.
Indeed, Downey's mesmerizing performance — his coldly analytical approach to any conundrum, his wild mood swings, his foolhardy tendency to charge where angels would fear to tread — ranks as one of cinema's most authentic portrayals of Doyle's famed detective.
