Starring: Robert Downey Jnr, Jude Law, Rachel McAdams, Mark Strong Director: Guy Ritchie Category: IIB
After subjecting the fianc?e of his trusted lieutenant, Dr Watson, to an ostentatious demonstration of his deductive skills, Sherlock Holmes' new acquaintance asks him: how can he make such grand assumptions based on such small details? The same can be said of Guy Ritchie's inflated re-imagining of possibly the best-known sleuth in modern literature: Sherlock Holmes is an exasperatingly overproduced, adrenaline-driven extravaganza in which the detective is an all-encompassing, all-out action hero, battling villains as much with his gunplay and fighting skills as with his cerebral capabilities.
That the new Holmes (played by Robert Downey Jnr) is unleashed not to solve small murders, but to save the world from tyranny, is proof of Ritchie's vision of making his reboot the first of perhaps a franchise of bombastic action thrillers, steeped in his signature elements. Stylised violence and irony-driven dialogue is delivered by smirking geezers in a grimy urban landscape, the last made much easier this time round as the story is set in Victorian London choking with signs of what Holmes mockingly describes as 'an industrious nation': monstrous factories, the menacing-looking still frames of the half-finished Tower Bridge and streets flanked by dank tenements and filled with the poor and disoriented.
Dispensing with the mysterious aura that permeates Arthur Conan Doyle's novels, Sherlock Holmes also plays up its protagonist as a larger-than-life eccentric. Downey Jnr plays a hero whose logical facade conceals a fragile psyche, in the mould of the many flawed whizzes he has played in recent years, from the cartoonish hero in Iron Man to the unravelling hack in Zodiac. Here, his Holmes is at a loss, as he grudgingly sees Watson (Jude Law), his composed and civilised foil, preparing to end their working relationship (and cohabitation of sorts) to reinvent himself as a married doctor.
The film begins with a scintillating sequence of the pair engaging in what should have been their last case. It's a showcase of things to come in the next two hours: as a carriage races down a dark London back street, we catch a glimpse of Watson and Scotland Yard's Lestrade (Eddie Marsan) cocking their soon-to-be-smoking barrels; in parallel, Holmes is seen sneaking into an underground catacomb, in which he beats up thugs (in typical Ritchie-style slow motion over a clinical, Fight Club-like narration of his moves) and busts a bizarre ritual presided over by Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong), an occult-dabbling aristocrat who heads a secret society hell-bent on using black magic and fear to 'create an indestructible and eternal empire', whose first step is to take over Britain - with what would now be labelled a terrorist act - and reclaim the American colonies.
Blackwood is sent to the gallows, but is soon discovered having arisen from his grave. And from the moment the camera shows Holmes and Watson marching away from the cemetery, intrigued by this seemingly paranormal event, Sherlock Holmes becomes a ceaseless roller-coaster ride of fights, chases, heroes cheating death and the antagonists revealing their increasingly outlandish plot to come to power - something that can only be stopped through Holmes' equally outlandish reasoning, a weird train of thought, which rivals that of symbologist Robert Langdon's in the film version of The Da Vinci Code.