New Sherlock Holmes: Lethal Weapon 2 In Victorian Clothes
The idea of Sherlock Holmes makes me yawn. When I want to watch a snooty drug addict solve formulaic mysteries by pulling clues out of thin air, I'll turn on House . In other words, I'm the person Guy Ritchie is hoping to smack in the face with his energized, modernized adaptation of the famous detective novels, starring Robert Downey Jr as a scruffy, quietly manic Sherlock Holmes, and Jude Law as a pimping ass Dr. John Watson (Just the way Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote him).
Weirdly, Ritchie's Holmes plays more like a Zack Snyder concoction, candy coated and slick as all hell. Except every moment where Snyder would have filled the screen with abs rippling in slo-mo like an American Flag on the 4th of July, Ritchie uses for talking. Usually Holmes himself, in voiceover, explaining exactly WHY he's popping open cans of Krav Maga as a part-time pit fighter.
The film makes the argument that someone able to kick this much ass would HAVE to be a genius, and it's the most incisive look into Batman's head we've seen since Dark Knight. It just happens to be in the middle of a Sherlock Holmes movie.
Or to be closer to the truth, Holmes is a classic 80's Buddy Cop movie dressed in Victorian clothes: The movie has much more in common with Lethal Weapon 2 than Hound of the Baskervilles.
Holmes is the sexy, self-destructive loose cannon whose case-closing skills excuse his propensity for getting things blowed up good. Watson is the beleaguered partner with a tenuous grasp on Holmes' leash, who only wants to settle down with his fiance and enjoy domesticated life. I half expected Watson to sigh at one point and mutter "2 weeks out from retirement, and then psychotic freemasons try to kill parliament and reclaim America. I'm gettin' too old for this shit."
The only thing Ritchie treats with less respect than the mystery genre is old-tyme London, which looks here as if God shoved a bunch of cheap aquarium castles into a muddy latrine and called it a day.
Mark Strong plays Lord Blackwood, a profoundly creepy villain who has convinced London he's risen from his own grave thanks to his mastery of black magic. He tells Holmes that he will kill 5 times, and that Holmes is powerless to stop him. The bodies begin to stack up, Holmes is framed, and has to bring down the devil himself in order to clear his and Watson's good names. Drugs are consumed, Dark Arts are practiced, the phrase "Dead Ginger Midget" gets tossed around liberally and the game is afoot.
As in every good Buddy Cop flick, There's a hot chick (Rachel MacAdams as Irene Adler) who's our hero's Kryptonite, an angry superior who gives Holmes' the stinkeye while spitting lines like "I hope you know what you're doing," and a smarmy, sub-boss bad guy hiding behind his position of authority.
There's something comforting in seeing this 80's-formula cheese repurposed and served up as "the thinking man's action movie." Mostly because it wears waistcoats and muttonchops, smokes pipes and has an accent. It should be a pretty decent test to see if that old chestnut "everything sounds smarter with a British accent" is true. I've listened to Karl Pilkington for 5 minutes, so I know that's bullshit, but it'll be interesting to see if someone who appreciated the density of plot in GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra turns their nose up at Sherlock Holmes because "It's all smart and shit." Really, it's not.
That's not to say it's completely empty-headed. It's twisty, but accommodatingly so - most of the mysteries are almost instantly solved mere seconds after they're introduced, and the ones that aren't are neatly tied up in the entertaining little victory monologue Holmes gives at the end. The disappointments include MacAdams as a drab femme fatale, some deadly slow pacing problems in the middle third of the movie, and not enough moments where Downey and Law are allowed to just bullshit back and forth.
Law almost steals the movie out from under Downey, appropriating serious old-school suave of the classic Connery variety. But like Iron Man, this is Downey's show, and the little guy hoists another movie up on his back and makes a basic, mildly entertaining action flick into something more through sheer force of personality. Ritchie didn't change my mind about Holmes - most of the movie slid right off my brain about 2 minutes after I left the theater, and I feel no immediate need to ever see this thing again - but he did reinforce the growing notion that if any good actor out there has a shot at legitimate old-school movie-star status besides Will Smith, it just might be Robert Downey, Jr.
Check out more of Fatboy's reviews with 'Avatar' Is Horribly Written, Way Too Long, Totally Worth It and '2012' Sucks Worse Than the Mayans Could Have Predicted.
Well Sherlock wasnt supposed to always explain the science behind everything, he was more or less supposed to be an imitation of the authors know it all professor friend. He was supposed to have superhuman powers of deduction, it wasnt a Bill Nye episode. You guys need to lighten up and not take movies seriously.
ReplyThey don't sound smarter because they have BRITISH accents, they sound smarter because they have ENGLISH accents. Scots and Welshmen are also British, but using a Scottish accent just makes things kooky (Trainspotting) and I don't think a Welsh accent has ever appeared in American cinema.
ReplyI will agree, mostly because I can actually tell the difference now that I've spent a month watching BBC shows....English definitely does the most to increase the perceived smartness....depending on the thickness of the accent, though, Scottish and Welsh can also make it sound somewhat smarter (thick Scottish=kooky or I-can't-tell-what-you're-saying, only a hint of Scottish=tough, but still pretty smart). Welsh, at least to my ear, is mostly a more lyrical-sounding accent.
I will say, without a context for comparison, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish (don't hate on me, people, I will defend it) all have similar elements, I suspect because all three have a fairly strong Gaelic heritage that I would assume helped shape their accents.
"The idea of Sherlock Holmes makes me yawn. When I want to watch a snooty drug addict solve formulaic mysteries by pulling clues out of thin air, I'll turn on House ..."
ReplyYou complete, utter imbecile. I don't even... Ugh. There are no words to descrbe the level of moronic stupidity in that single snooty statement. NO. WORDS. Webster, get on it. I'm thinking something between "retarded" and "ignorant" but I can't make those two click together. Retardant? Ignotard? Retorant?
um... house's principal characters (house and wilson) are based on sherlock and watson and both things have many things in common like opiate addiction
(sherlock = heroin, house = vicodin)and having only one or two friends, also share a common format of the main character finding things out over time and solving the problem with little details and sudden epiphany these are just the surface similarities look into them
JosephLinden is right. House is based on Holmes. Even House's NAME is reminiscent of Holmes (which sounds much like "homes.")
Eveything in Ritchie's movie is there in Conan Doyle's writing, if you lean over a bit, and kind of squint at it. In "The Solitary Cyclist", for example, Holmes beats the snot out of some thug in a bar fight, displaying uncommon ability as a pugilist, and afterwards exults to Watson about how much he enjoyed it. It's simple enough to extrapolate the fights in the movie from that. The same with Irene Adler, THE Woman, as Holmes calls her.
ReplyAlso, the depictions of London, especially the views of the Thames, are clearly taken fom contemporary images, and are consequently pretty accurate.
They don't have "British" accents to make them sound smarter, they have them because THEY'RE BRITISH.
Replyrobert downey jr isn't british
But Holmes and Watson are.
"The idea of Sherlock Holmes makes me yawn. When I want to watch a snooty drug addict solve formulaic mysteries by pulling clues out of thin air, I'll turn on House ..."
ReplyYou lost me at there, you figure it out why, you idiot.
Just a few too many action scenes. I'm all for action (infact, I love it) but if it adds nothing to the story, I'm bored. Kind of like when someone is spilling out what would be an entertaining anicdote had they not gone into detail about the name of the street the banana store was on and how many people were around or some s**t. Love the action, as long as it makes sense and is relevant.
ReplySo. Overally, I think this to be only a bit reminescent of low comedy. But. I enjoyed it as I could compare it to the original and also, from the "it's my topic" point of view when it came to details (I often think about movies as the work that has been done and I understand, from the "skill" point of view) - some actors performances, costumes, decorations, camera... Not quite amazing but not half that bad. Okay, so it has got not much of a real value as a film yet it's more accurate than older (and generally at least a bit better) adaptations of the thing, if nothing else.
ReplyI have to admit that I was ESPECIALLY bothered with fighting scences... I reall could do without detailed view of the belief that one can become an encyclopedy of human biology and think faster than a computer. On the contrary, I loved "looks and sound" of the movie (as you could guess from what I've said before). Which would be everything, I think. Still, I might as well watch it once again someday... It's better than watching Sense and Sensibility (mom's part) or Battlestar Galactica series (boys' part) all over again and again (which is exactly what would happen if you'd share a TV with circle of people and another one with childern) and more acceptable than movies like Tideland or even If... Good compromise. And that is, in my opinion, like the best word to describe the whole new Sherlock Holmes movie: "a compromise". It's not logical nor interesting, it's not dump or boring, either...
Wow, why had I just spent so much of valuable time writting about (this) movie?! Oh, well...
Okay, it's much like as with that Lethal Weapon 2: you don't praise it but you still watch it. :D Or at least I watch it about every other year... Usually it's an accident I don't resist. ;P
somewhere amidst all the arguing and b***hing about how this movie is just like cop shows and buddy cop flicks, it seems that everyone has forgetten that ALL of those things originally stemmed from sherlock holmes. sherlock holmes was the original police procedural. those books created the entire genre, and everything since has simply expanded on the same formula. having read the books, i think guy ritchie did a pretty decent job adapting them, especially the dynamic between holmes and watson. i totally agree that the film feels like an action flick dressed up in victorian garb, and the parallels drawn to 80's buddy cop flicks are f**king spot-on. that's the whole point.
ReplySorry for splitting hairs but he doesnt use Krav Maga, he uses bartitsu.
ReplyJust the way Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote him). yes you smug bastard, read the books, holes was manic depressive, watson was a fat toddering a*****e, thats why holmes was on drugs, self medicating, and he got into fights, he wasn't snooty, and frankly i wonder how you got the facts, go get them from the bookstore, and stop whining from your moms basement and join the f**king real world
ReplyLooks like it's you who haven't read the goddamn books.
yeah...maybe you should go back and check the books. watson was actually a young man newly married (like in the movie) through most of the books. it's only in the latest of the novels that he's older. it was that in the old movie adaptations, they always cast watson as an older man, hence the misconception.
Disappointing. I could almost hear whoever wrote this whining to his mom in the background.
ReplyYou know house was based on Holmes right?
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesIf that's true, they did a piss poor job with it.
Holmes was based, at least in part, on Conan Doyle's medical professor*, Joseph Bell, so that whole thing is a rather neat circle.
* Edgar Allen Poe's Dupin was a huge influence, too. So Holmes' roots are at least partially American.
@SeanDimitri they captured the character quite well. Holmes is a heroin addict who doses up because he's bored, Watson constantly tells him he shouldn't do it but never manages to do anything about it. Because he's such a genius, Holmes gets to - and does - insult the very cops who gave him something to do, pretty much the whole time he's with them. And half the time he starts off saying "no. That looks boring, solve it yourself"
Sounds pretty much like House's character to me....the only real difference is that Wilson isn't as utterly in awe of House's brilliance as Watson is in awe of Holmes's.
"Erm, as someone who read the books instead of watching the s**tty ripoffs of the books for the last... 122 years since, this is probably the closest representation of Holmes yet. Sherlock Holmes was the original batman. He could fight, he was the master of disguise, he had the ultrapreparedness of Batman, he had the brain, he was an addict to more than just Opium (though opium was his main)."
Reply Hide All See All 4 RepliesYou're 100% right. Batman was based on Sherlock Holmes (thanks to Bill Finger, not that ass rapist Bob Kane, who barely named the character and was telling everyone he was the genius behind it). Before critizicing Guy Ritchie, go read the books, jerks. I've never seen a Ritchie movie before, but I'm looking forward to them now (specially Lobo).
And yeah, House is a modern retelling of Holmes, that is pretty f'king obviuos to anyone who has read the books.
yes. holmes and watson in the books were the exact opposite of the way they've portrayed before this (awesome) movie
I thought he did coke?
I thought so too. I guess that was just when Watson met Holmes.
@Ack-ness, yes, he did do coke as well. He did things that would put Nikki Sixx to shame.
this was like all the cop shows on TV some mentalist, CSI and a bit of law and order
ReplyNo matter how it turns out in the end, I always appreciate it when someone tries a new take on Holmes. Most accepted versions play down the bipolar boxer aspect of Sherlock and the fact that Watson was originally fairly suave and handsome, so even if this version goes crazy in the other direction at least it's something fresh.
ReplyGod bless you for this review. I hate what Ritchie did with the Sherlock Holmes story. This could have been an interesting film if the casting was better, and it wasn't turned into a steampunk bromance action flick. I'm surprised there was no gigantic mechanical killer spider robot in it.
Reply Hide All See All 3 Replies"bromance"? really?? read a book! maybe if you read a sherlock holmes book you'd get the movie!
Well, it is weird and the movie could be much better if it wasn't so simple in a way BUT: books are almost gay and Holmes is literally creating himself super-action situations so he can have some thrill and to amaze ordinary people even more (His Watson, most of all. Which is weird.). And about the fact that it's so steampunk?? I'd say it's probably the only thing that I wouldn't change (at least, not so much)! Steampunk is great when you eliminate cheap parodies and without it, the new Sherlock Holmes would be completely boring. I think I'd never watch it if it wasn't for aesthetics of metal gears and Hans Zimmer's music (which was always working great in movies). XD
"Books are almost gay"? Are some of them only conflicted?
You do know House is an adaptation of Sherlock Holmes, right?
ReplyNo...it's not. The character, House, is based off Holmes. Not the show...stupid f**kin' fanbois.
Same thing, right? If not for the character, there wouldn't be a show. And this isn't speculation either. Medical Mysteries came before House and no one watched it. Add the character House, BAM overnight sensation. Not only that Wilson is based on Watson.
You do know House is an adaptation of Sherlock Holmes, right?
ReplyWhile I think Guy Ritchie is about as original and clever as Stephanie Meyer (alright, he's slightly more original and clever than that) and Jude Law is an ugly twat whose 'acting' leaves me cold, I want to see this movie purely for the looks and talent of Robert Downey Junior. I have enjoyed absolutely everything I have seen him in - even the stuff that wasn't great.
ReplyBut I'm not sure what you mean about an accent. It's a refreshing change to have them sound like Londoners rather than those accents I'm always hearing! ;oP