Sherlock Holmes

This prestigious Warner Bros. 'event' movie is the kind of grand, sweeping historical adventure that's hard not to like. That's the magic of movies... to transport you to a fictonal version of another place and time, where you can forget your worries and get wrapped up in a cinematic fantasy. Sherlock Holmes is one of those great timeless characters who gets revisited every so often, so I imagine it would be hard to find a new angle to exploit without retreading a lot of old ground. Guy Ritchie and Robert Downey Jr. don't do anything too radical with the idea, this Sherlock Holmes is still very much a man equipped with a brilliant mind with a flair for solving crimes. What they do with it though is mould the mythos to their own particular talents, bringing an extremely modern eye to bear on a gritty slice of romanticised victoriana with a view to making it as accessible to contemporary audiences as possible. And by jove, do they succeed.

This is London at the height of the British Empire... Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) and Watson (Jude Law) are brothers in arms, solving tricky crimes for Scotland Yard. Ritchie comes at the story as if it were the confident sequel to an unseen origin story (and I am glad that they didn't try to do something like Sherlock Holmes: Year One, I think that would've been a bit too cocky). We pick up the story as if it were the climax of the first film, with Holmes and Watson defeating the villainous Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong) for the first time. From here a new story unfolds, revealing previously unseen complications and stumbling over the dysfunction that comes part and parcel with Holmes' peerless brilliance. Sherlock Holmes also takes a page out of the book of the classic 1980s film, Young Sherlock Holmes, by riffing on the Victorian-era obsession with the occult and black magic, lending this thrilling adventure a rather welcome macabre edge.

I like the fact that this film doesn't take the character of Sherlock Holmes for granted. It would've been a bit cliched to give us a tortured angst-ridden Holmes, but going the other way and having him operate as some kind of cardboard superhero would've been an opportunity wasted. One of the great things about modern cinema revisiting these adventure classics is that we can bring new ideas to old material and breath life into these stories once more. An eccentric genius like Holmes possesses such astonishing powers of deducation that a modern audience expects there to be a downside to this. A certain level of realism is called for - Sherlock Holmes is, after all, only human.


So Sherlock Holmes looks at how the character's talents may make him unlikeable and solitary. This is where the casting of Robert Downey Jr. is a big coup... the post-prison Downey Jr. excels at playing characters with hubric flaws. It's a strange combination of confidence and humility (Iron Man, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) that makes him an ideal choice for a character like Holmes. This is what Downey Jr. brings to a role - the ability to take an inherently arrogant character and to make them likeable, human and vulnerable without losing that higher state of functioning or confidence. He balances these characterisations on just the right side of smug... it's a screen persona no doubt informed by his own troubled past, and I appreciate that Downey Jr. can re-channel his past experiences into such positive energy. I look forward to where his future film roles may take him in his development of this.

The film's success isn't all down to Downey Jr. either, Rachel McAdams does well as Holmes' wiley love interest and Jude Law is great (if a little underused) as the long-suffering Watson (though I don't know about the bit where Watson kills someone - doesn't that go against the hippocratic oath?) Ritchie also uses some narrative trickery to impress the audience... for example, at one point he lays out a sequence of scenes and implies that they're consecutive, only to revisit them later on to show what happened between these scenes. It could be seen as a bit of a cheat in any other film, but I think there's a certain audience expectation for this kind of showmanship in a Sherlock Holmes movie, so I think he gets away with it. Ritchie wisely also doesn't shortchange the problem-solving tradition of Arthur Conan Doyle's stories despite the film's apparent emphasis on acting, wit and spectacle. It's just an all-round great package, and there's a potential in this production for an adventure series of Indiana Jones-like proportions. Bring on the sequel!

DIRECTOR: Guy Ritchie
WRITER/SOURCE: Script by Michael Robert Johnson, Anthony Peckham and Simon Kinberg. Based on the characters created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
KEY ACTORS: Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, Rachel McAdams, Mark Strong, Eddie Marsan, James Fox, William Hope, Hans Matheson, Kelly Reilly, Geraldine James

RELATED TEXTS:
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote his first Sherlock Holmes novel in 1887, it was called A Study in Scarlet. He would go on to write three more full-length novels and over 50 short stories.
- The sequel to this version of Sherlock Holmes is Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories have inspired countless novels, computer games, radio serials, television shows and films. The most famous films would have to be the 14-film series starring Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes, starting with The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1939.
- Other interesting film variations on the characters and stories include Young Sherlock Holmes(a fantasy-adventure), The Seven Percent Solution (a more subversive take) , Without a Clue (a parody starring Michael Caine as Holmes and Ben Kingsley as Watson), The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (another comedy) and They Might Be Giants (with George C. Scott as a modern-day man who believes himself to be Holmes).

AWARDS
Academy Awards - nominated Best Original Score and Best Art Direction.
Golden Globes - nominated Best Actor - Comedy or Musical (Robert Downey Jr.)