REVIEW: Star Chemistry Lifts ‘Sherlock Holmes’
by John NolteFor those of you expecting what the trailer promised: a bloated, confusing, noisy, headache-inducing Christmas blockbuster weighed down with CGI and barely made watchable by the presence of He Who Makes Everything Better – star Robert Downey Jr. – you’re in for a surprise. Director Guy Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes” might be a tad bloated, somewhat hard to follow, and easily 15 minutes too long, but the director makes this umpteenth cinematic re-imagining of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s intrepid detective his own and delivers a spirited, entertaining, blissfully mindless couple of hours at the movies.
Ritchie’s slovenly Holmes is a long way from Basil Rathbone’s, the actor who played the resident of 221 B Baker Street in 14 films over half as many years starting in 1939, and he’s even further from Doyle’s. The mannered, sophisticated detective is now a borderline recluse who’s utterly dysfunctional when not preoccupied with a case, a glib ladies man and ready action hero who knows how to use his fists. As his physician-partner in crimesolving, Jude Law grabs his best role in years as Holmes’ closest friend and mother hen.
Set in London in the late 1800s, the game afoot does not involve Holmes most famous nemesis Professor Moriarty this time, but instead Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong), a presumably hanged ritual killer and user of the dark arts who might have risen from the dead with a master plan for world domination. Through an influential Gentleman’s Club of fellow occultists, Blackwood all but controls Scotland Yard which leaves only Holmes, Watson and Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams) — a scheming American woman from Holmes’ past with dueling loyalties and a mind just as sharp as her romantic rival’s — to stop him. (more…)
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