Originally posted on AD Forums on February 3, 2013. This review contains marked spoilers.
The whole reason I watched this movie was because of an AV Club comment. I wish I had taken down who wrote this immortal summary of the Robert Downey Jr.-led version of Sherlock Holmes, because it is probably the most accurate, pithy, profound summary of a film I've ever heard. The comment, mildly paraphrased, went something like "The Ritchie Sherlock Holmes is pretty faithful to the books, but instead of Sherlock finding clues, he punches people."
That's pretty much exactly the movie, in a nutshell. As a summer blockbuster action film, it has a lot of strengths, and is a remarkably good film, with plenty of visual inventiveness, fun casting, and a script that, while problematic, isn't completely asinine. As a Sherlock Holmes film, it's an absolutely preposterous exercise that somehow believes Holmes was an 1800s James Bond who uses his deductive skills most clearly to figure out how to punch people effectively.
The storyline is one of my problems with the film at large. My initial misgivings about the strong steeping of supernatural goings-on in the film SPOILER turned out to be completely unfounded by the ending, where Sherlock, for the first time in the movie, breaks down the entirety of Lord Blackwood's plot and monologues at the villain about its various groundings in reality, an enjoyable sequence if one ignores the fact that Sherlock really could just shoot this guy right now END SPOILER, but there is still a ridiculous amount of shadowy things that amount to nothing, sequel hooks (which I hate), characters that needed serious fleshing-out to have the kind of story impact that the film hopes they'd have, and the list goes on. One of my biggest problems with the film was SPOILER the nature of The Order of Four itself. The film establishes that most of the Order is "good" and practices "good" magic that influences the entirety of the world's operations, but that Lord Blackwood's "practical" magic is against their codes. So why are so many people willing to shift to Blackwood's side before that immolating demonstration of might, if their codas bind them to "good" magic? More importantly, because Sherlock reveals that all of Blackwood's arts were parlor tricks... what does The Order of Four actually do to influence the course of the world? Are they just a bunch of geriatric delusional sods? END SPOILER I'm probably dissecting a popcorn movie too much, and, weirdly, most of the movie holds up better to scrutiny than, say, Silver Linings Playbook.
In regards to the script executing characters... it succeeds and fails. (It's hard to give a proper analysis of the characters of Sherlock Holmes without going back to the books/other interpretations/common cultural consensus, so this will probably be the most biased part of the review for me.) I really did like Jude Law's interpretation of Watson head and shoulders above RDJ's Sherlock. Law not only nails the exasperation, but incredible loyalty, of Watson, but isn't portrayed as the complete moron he's usually made to be in popular culture. The script does Watson a lot of favors as a character, too: his affections for Mary Morstan (a near non-entity of a character) are nicely played, and his arc through the film, holding onto both her and the wild life he's become accustomed to with Sherlock, is remarkably subtle in a movie where bombast, bondage nudity, and punching things often substitute for nuance. As for RDJ's Sherlock, he is too much in the mold of the "rogue hero" that's been typified by Captain Jack Sparrow. The movie wants us to so desperately like Sherlock while conceding that you should find Sherlock aggravating. It can't have both, and the character suffers for it, especially as, in this iteration, we are supposed to see him as a genius, a viable romantic partner, someone worth defending, and someone who should be dropped off a bridge, sometimes all in the same moment. Too many paradoxes to work. For what it's worth, Downey Jr. plays this Sherlock-like character very well. He is appropriately ruggedly handsome and irksome in equal measure, and I can totally see his character slogging through a dirty, grimy, grotesque underworld just to find the frog fetus that'll unlock his case, unlike some of the more gorgeously polished actors who've played Sherlock (coughBenedictTimothyCarltonCumberbatchcough). The other problem with Watson and Holmes in this variant of the story, though, is that they are both presented as very intelligent individuals with their own individual strengths... whose primary mode of solving crimes is knocking the shit out of anyone in their sight line. I get that this is an action movie, but the integration of the action elements is wholly inorganic and distracting in all but one case (SPOILER the hog-slaughtering facility sequence END SPOILER). A beloved series predicated on intellectualism is probably the worst thing to ever turn into a beat-em-up action flick anyways.
I actually liked Irene Adler here more than I've liked other interpretations of her character, and I'm pretty sure that fell entirely on Rachel McAdams' acting, as she's turned into a slightly more capable version of your typical action-movie heroine here. She's being put in harms' way by lots of men, and only other men can save her! (At least she's not being turned straight by Sherlock, I guess. Poor Irene Adler.) Not exactly progressive, but again, Rachel McAdams plays her with a really nice mixture of guile, genuine concern, and shiftiness. Probably the worst bit of character execution regards Moriarty, aka the dude with a gun that looks like a knife. Finding out that this malevolent figure pulling the strings is little more than a sequel hook is pretty damn annoying. And as for Lord Blackwood... Mark Strong seriously looks like Evil Steve Carell and it was distracting.
Truthfully, as an action movie - and discounting that making this canon an action film was a terribly weird idea - it has a lot to recommend it over other similar-minded films. The set work, costume design, and visuals (aside from some terrible CGI in the boatyard and regarding the construction of London Bridge) are beautiful, sumptuous, and work well for the setting. Again, aside from some terrible CGI, this is a beautiful-looking film, and, more importantly, a real-looking film. (Seriously, those frogs were disgusting-looking). The acting is uniformly excellent (even from Evil Steve Carell, who I didn't say much about because his whole character is "OMGZMENACING"), the cinematography is inventive and fun, and Guy Ritchie directs one hell of a good action movie. The visual language of Sherlock Holmes is top-tier. Much as I don't like the general idea of Sherlock punching people all the time, the fight scenes are well-choreographed and certainly more interesting and involving than most of Nolan's Dark Knight work. It's never a boring movie by any stretch of the movie, and damn it, the studio/Ritchie/the actors wanted to make this a really entertaining action movie. They certainly did that well.
But how on earth does one read Sherlock Holmes and go, "this is prime action movie material"? Part of me is torn between the fact that this is genuinely a well-designed crowd-pleaser, something that's very hard to find in this media environment. Another part of me wants to just be really annoyed at how I really didn't like what it did tot he canon. I'm gonna split the difference in my score. I really enjoyed watching this movie, and would probably enjoy watching it again, but its weird deviation from the logic of the novels does read to me as defilement.
***.5/*****
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