Mini Review - Sherlock Holmes

I have a confession to make. This was initially supposed to be the last sequel baiting with this film going up against Game of Shadows. Unfortunately, Secret Empire ended up being a much bigger project than I was envisioning, combined with some personal sh*t meant I’ve fallen behind and now I’m reducing it to a mini-review to compensate.

Yes, yes, I know, but here we are, so let’s get to it

After a few bad years for Robert Downey Jr where he was imprisoned in a rehab facility for drug users, Robert Downey Jr came back, and came back hard, winning over the audience with Iron Man in 2008 and in 2009, he was the lead star in Sherlock Holmes. It was a decision that won him a golden globe. The film was successful commercially earning $524m on a $90m budget and also critically, a 70% rating on Rotten tomatoes, and 2 academy award nominations. So, 2009 was almost 10 years ago, does it still hold up? Here’s my take on it.

When Lord Henry Blackwood is captured by Sherlock Holmes and sentenced to death, murmurs about his practice of witchcraft emerge and he promises his escape. And soon after that exact thing happens and he continues to prepare his plan. Holmes and Watson must uncover the scheme and work to capture Blackwood as the bodies begin to pile up again.

I will say this first, it’s certainly an interesting direction to take with Sherlock Holmes, it’s primarily an action film, rather than a mystery. There are multiple fight scenes, some physical and others with guns, some seem to be done on set and others with green-screen. Sherlock has an interesting fighting technique. He looks for his opponents’ weaknesses and exploits them, often with the outcome of the fight playing twice. I honestly don’t see why it was necessary to play them twice but that’s a minor nit-pick.

There are still elements of the mystery, we don’t know how Blackwood is committing most of the murders, plus there’s the mysterious Irene Adler and her oh so mysterious employer. Erm, if you’re a big Sherlock Holmes fan, you probably guess it being Moriarty straight away, and you’d be right. As for the circumstances behind the deaths, the mystery is not all that compelling, we only see the evidence as Sherlock does, but we don’t have access to his thought process, the answers aren’t easy to follow and we just have to listen as Sherlock boasts about his conclusions later on.

So, Robert Downey Jr plays Sherlock Holmes. They’ve got an American playing a British character again! It’s one of the better American British accents, in that it’s not painful to listen to, so we’ll just give them that and get to his character. Sherlock Holmes is erratic, you never quite know what he’s thinking until he reveals all. He practices shooting indoors, tests various drugs on his dog and barely sees the light of day when he’s not working on a case… These are generally played for comedy as opposed to them being taken seriously, where he’d be less of a likeable character.

Standing at his side is Watson, played by Jude Law, who is actually English. Anyway, his arc is that has a girlfriend who he’s marrying. He’s moving out of Baker Street and Holmes isn’t happy about it. He’s clever in his own right, and keeps Holmes in check on some occasions, but he doesn’t have all the answers, and has moments of being a bit stupid, running into trip wires.

On that note, is it a bit odd that I was expecting a massive explosion at the end of the second act to leave some kind of damage. Sherlock, Watson and Irene make it out of it in tact, a massive, massive explosion they spend several seconds showing us in slow-mo. Just some kind of collateral damage? Nope, they need to be alive and unharmed so we can shove in another fight scene, that works too, I guess.

So, about the magic thing. I personally believe magic belongs nowhere near a character like Sherlock Holmes and I was disappointed when it was brought up, thankfully it is explained that there was never any magic, which I’m grateful for. Whether it should’ve come up at all is debatable, and I honestly find myself leaning toward the no camp. Very little in this movie would’ve changed if it wasn’t believed that Blackwood practised Black Magic.

I’ll give credit where it’s due, the set-design looks good, very much captures the Sherlock Holmes aesthetic, the acting is good, the set-up is handled with some amount of care and without shoving the sequel in your face. The music, whilst a tad OTT at times serves the era well and I love the character dynamics between Holmes and Sherlock

Sherlock Holmes is a good movie, with some decent action and compelling plot-threads and characters. The lack of a compelling mystery and having sorcery as a back-bone to the plot serve to hurt it as an adaptation.

Rating 70/100