By Dan Cohen, Santa Monica Reporter
This years’ Sherlock Holmes is not your fathers’ or your grandfathers’ Arthur Conan Doyle. But if you scratch the surface you’ll find heart of the original character, still beating steadily.
Doyle first introduced Holmes in 1887, with “A Study in Scarlett.” The character was allegedly based on one of the author’s university presidents, who impressed the young Conan Doyle with his distinctive observational and inductive skills. Readers immediately responded.
Conan Doyle went on to produce 55 more stories and four novels featuring the popular detective, whose affinity for minutia bordered on the supernatural. After he killed him off in 1893, in “The Final Problem,” there was such public outrage he brought the character back, and kept him going until 1927, three years short of his death.
More than 60 actors have played Sherlock in movies and television. Basil Rathbone took the role most famously, in a dozen or so theatrical films, released between 1939 and 1946, but the impressive list of other Holmes’ includes Michael Caine, Roger Moore, Christopher Plummer, Jonathon Pryce, Matt Frewer, and British horror stars Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, both of whom played the role several times. Even Charlton Heston took up the pipe and cape, in a 1991 television film, “The Crucifer of Blood.” My personal favorite, worth seeking out on DVD, is Robert Stephens in Billy Wilders’ offbeat “Private Life of Sherlock Holmes,” from 1970.
Now comes Robert Downey in Guy Ritchies’ “Sherlock Holmes,” a radical reimagining that takes the genre on a roller coaster ride that somehow manages to honor Doyle’s conventions. Credit that to Downey’s blazing star turn and Jude Law’s spirited Watson.
Even when this huge movie stumbles over its own hyper kinetic feet, which is fairly often, Downey keeps it standing, nobly.
Ritchie uses the same attention grabbing editing that earned his first two features, “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,” (1996,) and “Snatch,” (1998,) world wide acclaim. But here he taps the talents of an army of digital and other visual artists–I lost count after 60, in the end credits–to bring us a Victorian England full of post industrial sound and fury.
Sometimes the production design, combined with relentless movement, overwhelms the characters. On several occasions I struggled to see where they were in the frame. The room where Holmes lives and conducts his experiments, are so cluttered with paraphernalia the humans seem out of place in it. But the movie draws on so many tricky devices, sooner or later you succumb to them.
One of Ritchie’s stylistic devices is to radically speed up, then slow down his action scenes with a jerky rhythm that gives them a greater visual kick. You wouldn’t call it punch as much as crunch, because his slow motion inclines to moments of fists slamming faces or head banging, of which there are many. He loves shattering flesh.
But where the technique really pays off are scenes where Holmes’ powers of observation come into play. The stories always bothered me because there was no way to anticipate Holmes unerring ability to make sense of seemingly unrelated data. You couldn’t play along at home, in a manner of speaking, because you didn’t see what he saw. To some extent Ritchie compensates for this. He replays key sequences with Holmes’ narration, so at least we can see things from the hyper observant detectives’ point of view. It’s all after the fact, of course, but at least we get the satisfaction of his actual point of view. Some will find this irritating but after the motif was established I looked forward to it reappearing.
The story begins with a disorienting high speed chase, which ends in the lair of the film’s villain, Lord Blackwood, elegantly played by Mark Strong, a sturdy English character actor whom Ritchie has used before. Like the movie serials of old, Richie’s movie fires up the action in what seems like the middle, not unlike the Indiana Jones series.
Blackwood is foiled, sentenced and hanged, although we know he’s coming back. Before that happens, a former lover, (Rachel McAdams,) appears with an agenda set by an unknown overlord whose identity is held to the end. The script, a sometimes routine, sometimes inspired cocktail of character and plot complications, keeps every player in constant peril. As I said in the beginning, this is anything but a traditional take.
Downey is the twitching, obsessively chattering core of the movie, but beyond that, a Holmes of almost absurd physicality. He’s constantly leaping out of windows, grappling enemies or fist fighting, bare chested, for sport. Ritchie surrounds him with stunning eye candy, mainly a series of deliriously detailed London cityscapes that are almost thrown away before we can take them in. To that he’s added a propulsive score by Hans Zimmer.
Downey’s outsize performance fights for our attention with the big scale action. There are the obligatory explosions but also a number of inspired set pieces where the characters smartly interact with the brutally hard world of London’s working class. A rousing fight in a shipyard is as witty as it is spectacular. And yes, the movie pulls in several directions at once. But there’s so little is at stake it’s hyper kinetic quality actually enhances it as an entertainment. The movie’s whole purpose is to distract us, which it does, most of the time, without insulting our intelligence.
My guess is that anything less than a complete reimagining of Sherlock Holmes would have disappointed. In stuffing the production right to its breaking point Ritchie took a risk, and largely succeeded.
Too often the big studios put coal in our stocking at Christmas. They unload wheezing, middlebrow comedies, or indifferently directed action flicks that take make us feel like we’ve consumed too much popcorn and soda, even when we’re living on granola.
The new “Sherlock Holmes” may be confounding and even confusing at times, but it’s an entertainment that, against all odds, might satisfy the entire family.
