Like a jaunty, boozy, fisticuffing night spent at a
nineteenth-century cockney brothel,
Sherlock
Holmes rocks and rambles, steams and swings, bounces and blazes with the
type of electricity it wasn’t clear director Guy Ritchie was capable of
generating. Kickstarted by a jangly old world-new world score that oozes
breathless verve, Ritchie’s vision of the renowned sleuth is in fact an assured
reinvention, imagining Holmes as a frazzled mastermind with theatrical flair,
martial arts skills and a voluminous intellect that he naturally employs in the
service of mystery-solving. Ritchie’s film opens with a fleet-footed race
through the dark, grimy London streets and catacombs to arrive at a black magic
ceremony orchestrated by murderous Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong), whom Holmes
and trusty sidekick Dr. Watson (Jude Law) – a voice of good sense and, thus,
the bickering foil to loose-cannon Sherlock – ably foil. This success, however,
is only a beginning in Michael Robert Johnson, Anthony Peckham and Simon
Kinberg’s live-wire script, which proceeds to briskly map out not only its
protagonists’ siblings-soulmates relationship but also tease out the true
nefariousness afoot, which revolves around the executed Lord Blackwood’s apparent
rise from the grave and subsequent plot to use the dark arts to seize control
of jolly old England and, thereafter, the world.
Aided by Philippe Rousselot’s evocative cinematography,
Ritchie shoots London like a grubby nascent metropolis escaping psychic and
Satanic superstitions to be reborn, violently and unhappily, as a mecca of
industrialized modernity. That tension is at the heart of Holmes’ battle with
Blackwood, the former a champion of deductive reasoning and science and the
latter an embodiment of the otherworldly. Yet cannier still is the way that
Ritchie weaves such historical-transition undercurrents into the very fabric of
Holmes, from an early gag involving a
palm-reader informing Watson of his future with his fiancé (Kelly Reilly) to a
finale staged atop the under-construction Tower Bridge, a striking symbol of
the shifting tides upon which the film so swiftly rides. Nonetheless, this
holiday season franchise-initiator is first and foremost predicated on a
blockbuster blend of comedy, sexiness and action, and in that vein the director
– after a decade spent failing to fulfill the promise of
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels – is also up to the challenge.
From an extended apartment-to-street-to-shipyard brawl with a French behemoth
to two beautifully composed sequences in which we become privy to Holmes’
astute mental assessment of, and plans to take down, an adversary – moments
shot in slow-mo and narrated by the detective – the film is whiplash quick and
twice as exciting.
Ritchie provides the energized stewardship while his cast –
benefiting from characterizations and dialogue that crackle – deliver the sensuality
and humor. Strong’s silky-deep voice brings menace to Blackwood and, as Holmes’
former paramour and expert conniver Irene Adler, Rachel McAdams mix-and-matches
toughness, vulnerability and calculating deception with swoon-worthy aplomb.
Law, meanwhile, seems positively enlivened by Watson’s perpetually vexed (and
secretly smitten) attitude toward his partner as well as his acidic rat-a-tat
banter with Downey Jr. As for the star himself, Holmes proves an even more
delicious role than his seemingly tailor-made
Iron Man gig. The Baker Street sleuth’s unparalleled mind affords
Downey plentiful opportunities to milk smarty-pants arrogance for laughs, and
the character’s newfound combat competence presents numerous chances for
physical intrepidness. Yet it’s ultimately Downey Jr.’s idiosyncratic
conception of Holmes – brilliant in a fidgety, socially retarded, mad genius
sort of way, and rough-and-tumble in a manner that prizes brains over actual
brawn – that brings the material to life. Downy exudes lively, muscular
magnetism and more than a dash of debonair charm but isn’t afraid to make his
hero foppish or foolish. In the actor (as well as Ritchie’s) hands, he’s a
modernized Holmes both faithful to his origins and vigorously unique, an
ahead-of-his-time icon here resurrected, fittingly and thrillingly, for the
modern age.
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