No double-brimmed cap, no oversized magnifying glass, no trademark pipe, and heaping amounts of explosions -- this is Sherlock Holmes. While some may be bothered by the lack of classic trademarks in the new film based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s books, this less classically stylized Sherlock Holmes brings out more of the subtle, complex issues of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and of Holmes himself.
Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) is charged in the film with the task of stopping Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong) from launching his evil plan into action. Like Blackwood, who is notorious for his mind tricks, Holmes is devoted to getting inside people’s heads. With the aid of director Guy Ritchie (“RockNRolla”, “Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels”), Holmes’s wild eyes stare off into the great unknown of human hyperlogic, while chasing down Lord Blackwood through the dark, disorienting and tight-framed cinematography of Victorian London, showing what goes on in the detective genius’s head, and how he gets into other people’s heads.
With its understanding at the mercy of his deductive power, Holmes takes the audience along for a wild, and drug-addled, ride beyond reason and conventional logic to an inevitable, perfectly constructed truth at the end.
This rough-and-tumble comic, dramatic, and adrenaline pumping roller coaster of a film fills the unfortunately bland, and predictable, framework of the classic mystery almost to bursting with the crass, borderline diabolical, and sardonic Holmes that so many have forgotten.
Much like how Holmes and his incredibly able best friend and assistant John Watson (Jude Law) gingerly walk the line between chaos and order, so too does Ritchie walk the line between action flick and dark drama.
Amid the punches and gunshots, Ritchie maintains the substance of the story (screenplay by Anthony Peckham, Michael Robert Johnson and Simon Kinberg) by not making violence the goal, but rather using violence to present obstacles for Holmes to conquer in his attempt to solve the case.
Ritchie balances the well-choreographed action scenes highlight Holmes’s superhero-like reflexes and strength with a romantic subplot that highlights Holmes’s conventional weakness for a woman, Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams), and also his very human fear of losing the best, and possibly the only friend, Holmes has ever had -- Watson. These foibles shed some light into the pitch dark room where Holmes hides for weeks on end, accompanied only by highly dangerous drugs, pondering how to solve his cases, as well as perhaps how to preserve any shred of sanity he has left.
Certainly, these tendencies color Holmes’s reputation as the paragon of mental sharpness, and force the audience to ask whether Holmes would be worth a feature film at all had it not been for the talented support in the script and on screen he receives from Watson and, to an extent, Ms. Adler. Holmes is the film’s namesake, yet the constant presence of sidekicks, who are more his equals than anything, that Holmes is human, and all humans need help from friends.
Having read both your initial review and this rewrite, I'm pleased with what you kept and the changes you made. You did a great job of breaking up your paragraphs and the article itself is a quick, easy, entertaining read. I fear that it would be hard to follow for someone who hasn't seen the movie, though, because even though you offer a brief plot summary, sometimes you evaluate the film without examples, which leaves some readers at a loss.
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