Moofies - Sherlock Holmes

EXPECTATIONS: The casting in this looks great, but I really don’t like Guy Ritchie films. When I saw Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels I thought it was a pretty neat, stylish movie. Then Ritchie rehashed the exact same thing over and over again and I lost interest about half way through Snatch. Maybe he will surprise me with this one.

REALITY: Sherlock Holmes is a great character and this film would be far more interesting if it had tried to capture that instead of wowing us with stupid fight scenes. I understand that perhaps the idea was to re-invent Holmes, but I think that in order to do that there has to be more drastic changes made. You can’t just take the familiar Holmes setting and tack on a bit more testosterone and sex appeal and call it a re-invention.

Robert Downey Jnr. is fairly likeable I suppose, but his accent in this is pretty ordinary. He mumbles through his lines in what sounds like a piss take of a British accent. Jude Law plays a fairly whiney Watson who, again, is mostly likeable but doesn’t quite work. I don’t even know why Rachel McAdams is in this movie. She switches between being a sort of Catwoman character to being Holmes possible lover to being bad/good. She’s not on screen long enough to actually define who she is because she’s always doing something different and mostly irrelevant to the plot.

There are glimpses of a good film in here. Holmes and Watson have a couple of scenes where their banter is amusing and endearing, but then the plot moves on to another stupid stylish looking fight and I get bored. The ‘plot’ involving the supposed resurrection of Lord Blackwood is played as this big, evil thing, when the audience can obviously see that Holmes will figure it all out. There are far too many ‘I am so evil and this is some evil prophecy’ scenes that belong in an Underworld film and not in bloody Sherlock Holmes. Seriously, even Blackwoods haircut and jacket make him look like a vampire. It’s ridiculous.

At least it wasn’t another British gangster movie.

**1/2