Cinematic mystery that baffles in all the wrong ways
Full-blown bromance … Jude Law as Watson and Robert Downey Jr as Holmes in Sherlock Holmes
What a mysterious puzzle Guy Ritchie's new film presents. This time last year, he looked like a man in need of a miracle. The one-time saviour of British cinema's movie, the damp gangster squib RocknRolla, took under $6m in the US. Yet here he is, launching what looks like his very own period action superhero franchise. And he's been handed a rumoured $80m to blow on it.
1. Sherlock Holmes
2. Production year: 2009
3. Countries: Germany, Rest of the world, USA
4. Cert (UK): 12A
5. Runtime: 128 mins
6. Directors: Guy Ritchie
7. Cast: Bronagh Gallagher, Eddie Marsan, Geraldine James, Hans Matheson, James Fox, Jude Law, Kelly Reilly, Mark Strong, Rachel McAdams, Robert Downey Jr., William Hope
But Sherlock Holmes is high-end hack work. It could have been made by anyone. There's the odd Ritchie-ism, like crunchy slo-mo in the fight scenes, but he was, presumably, brought on board for reasons not wholly to do with his cinematic style.
Good news for those Holmes purists appalled by the prospect of literature's most cerebral sleuth getting a geezer makeover, but bad news for the rest of us: Sherlock Holmes isn't even a magnificent mistake. It's just a film that makes you hanker after Ritchie's back catalogue. Snatch included.
Holmes is played with boggle-eyed haminess by Robert Downey Jr while Jude Law is Watson – inspired casting at first glance: his weirdly boring aura superficially lending itself to the role. But they're both a pain: the former a cartoon with darting eyes rather than a brain, the latter just a blank.
The case they're given to solve is a non-canonical international emergency. While Arthur Conan Doyle set his hero small, neat conundrums, this Holmes has the whole world to save. An Aleister Crowley-style Satanist (Ritchie regular Mark Strong, with a Bela Lugosi hairdo) has cooked up a Da Vinci Code-sized plot involving coming back from the dead, infiltrating parliament and taking over the world.
This mammoth scale rather takes away from the minute pleasures of Holmes's sleuthery. All deductive insight here is in fact, rather feeble. This Holmes's expertise would struggle to impress the cops at Sun Hill. The disguises hardly wow, the wit fails to sparkle and the imagery tends to clod (there's an especially over-used crow).
Sherlock Holmes baffles in all the wrong ways. Is it a cool satire on Victorian seriousness? A thriller? A comedy? At least in the past Ritchie knew what he was making, even it wasn't always much good. This muddle of genres reflects a collapse of confidence in his ability to deliver anything.
His self-disbelief may be well-founded but competing intentions cancel each other out and Ritchie ends up picking up points neither for authenticity nor fashionable reinvention.
His one stab at the latter appears to have been the elevation of the Holmes/Watson relationship from clubby friendship (with homoerotic undertones) to full-blown bromance. At first, this is promising. With their natty suits and canes, their opera ticket tiffs and their campy domesticity Downey Jr and Law have the faint look, at times, of Gilbert and George.
But it's a hollow attempt at modernisation, and quickly grows dull. Watson's big dilemma – whether to quit his life with Holmes for marriage to lovely Mary (Kelly Reilly, underused) has, at heart, all the depth of a Wham! song.
Small wonder: introducing the film, producer Joel Silver proudly billed it as a family movie, a Christmas treat. And it is, indeed, the first of Ritchie's films not to get an R rating in the US. Holmes's drug taking is airbrushed out of the picture; he takes nothing stronger than claret. By withdrawing Holmes's cocaine, Ritchie has, I suppose, given his own career a shot in the arm. But what a curious way to do it.
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