Sherlock Holmes (2009)

This review includes full spoilers. Proceed accordingly. For other movie reviews from me, click HERE:

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Rating: PG-13
Director: Guy Ritchie
Writers: Michael Robert Johnson (screenplay and screen story), Anthony Peckham (screenplay), Simon Kinberg (screenplay), Lionel Wigram (screen story), Arthur Conan Doyle (characters by)
Stars: Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, Rachel McAdams, Mark Strong
Release Date: December 25, 2009 (United States)
Run time: 2 hours, 8 minutes

THE PLOT:

via wiki:

In 1890 London, private detective Sherlock Holmes and his partner Dr. John Watson prevent the ritualistic murder of a woman by Lord Henry Blackwood, a noble who has killed five women previously and claims to have supernatural powers. Inspector Lestrade and the police arrest Blackwood. Two months later, Watson, engaged to Mary Morstan, is moving out of 221B Baker Street and ending his partnership with Holmes, exhausted of his eccentricities. Blackwood summons Holmes before he is hanged and warns him that three more deaths will occur that he cannot stop. Blackwood is subsequently hanged and pronounced dead by Watson. Holmes is visited by former adversary Irene Adler, who asks him to find a missing man named Luke Reordan. Holmes follows her when she leaves and observes she is working for a man that Holmes deduces is a professor, and that he intimidates Adler.

Blackwood’s tomb is found broken into and Reordan’s corpse is inside his coffin. Following a series of clues from the body, Holmes and Watson find Reordan’s lab and discover experiments attempting to merge science with magic. Later Holmes is abducted and brought to the Temple of the Four Orders, a secret magical fraternity. The Order head Lord Chief Justice Sir Thomas Rotheram introduces Holmes to U.S. Ambassador Standish and Home Secretary Lord Coward, and they ask Holmes to stop Blackwood, a former member of the society and Rotheram’s secret illegitimate son. That night, Rotheram drowns in his bath as Blackwood watches. Coward calls a meeting of the Order and nominates Blackwood to take command of it, and Blackwood reveals himself to them. When he explains his plan to seize control of the British Empire and reconquer the United States, Standish attempts to shoot him but bursts into flames when he fires his gun, and flees out a window to his death.

Holmes studies the rituals of the Order and recognizes that Blackwood’s murders have been in accordance with their beliefs, and his final act will be to murder the members of Parliament. With the aid of Lestrade, Holmes surrenders and is taken to Coward, where he sees evidence on his clothes to deduce that Blackwood has conducted a ceremony in the sewers beneath the Palace of Westminster. Holmes escapes and enters the sewers with Watson and Adler, who find Blackwood’s men guarding a device developed by Reordan, designed to release cyanide gas into the Parliament chambers and kill all but Blackwood’s supporters, to whom he has secretly given an antidote. Blackwood comes before Parliament and announces their impending deaths, then attempts to activate the cyanide device by remote control; Adler is able to deactivate it with a controlled explosion and takes the canisters of cyanide. Coward and Blackwood’s supporters are apprehended as Blackwood flees Parliament.

Holmes chases Adler and she leads him to the top of the incomplete Tower Bridge, where Blackwood incapacitates Adler and then fights Holmes. Blackwood falls through the scaffolding and Holmes reveals he has deduced that all of his supposed supernatural feats were achieved through science and theatrical trickery, aided by Reordan’s experiments. A crane collapses, causing Blackwood to be ensnared and hung in chains off the bridge. Holmes revives Adler, who tells him that her employer is Professor Moriarty, and he is not to be underestimated.

As Watson moves out of 221B, a police constable reports to Holmes that a dead officer was found near Blackwood’s device. Moriarty used the confrontations with Adler and Blackwood as a diversion while he took a key component, based on the infant science of radio, from the machine. Holmes considers the case reopened.

My Review

I purchased a relatively nice top hat for a costume party earlier this year, and I have subsequently been seeking out reasons to wear it. Here we are – a rewatch and review of Sherlock Holmes. I’d like to grow the sideburns and mustache to properly accompany my hat, but I don’t think I can sell Mrs. Reviews on the idea.

I’m not sure which group of people were clamoring for live-action Sherlock Holmes content, back in 2009, but the film and TV industry started producing it in large amounts. There were these Guy Ritchie films. Ian McKellen did a 2015 film about a 90+ year old Holmes. Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly did a poorly-received parody of the franchise titled Holmes & Watson in 2018. Netflix did a franchise spinoff called Enola Holmes. CBS aired a 2012 version of the story, with the Watson character played by a gender-swapped Lucy Liu. I’m sure I’ve missed some in that rundown and there are more in the works… but the movie here feels like the re-launch point for the live-action Holmes character. You would assume then that something in the film convinced the story-telling world that there is great value in these characters and you’d be right. The buddy cop story genre is timeless, and a period-piece buddy cop story is so in particular. Guy Ritchie gives us a great update and reintroduction to the famous characters.

The primary adaptation to the source material is that Ritchie gives Holmes a personal life that is something of a mess. He’s a rough-around-the-edges man with a criminal ex-girlfriend and a distant relationship to proper hygiene. The book version of the character was almost certainly also a drug addict – cocaine in particular – but the Holmes of the books is still presented primarily as well put together. Whatever issues he might have had were hinted at, but they weren’t a feature of the story. The Ritchie films give us a tortured genius. That change makes Holmes more relatable in one respect, while continuing to leave him as unreachable in another.

For this type of Holmes to work, you need a charismatic actor to bring him to life. There might not be a more charismatic actor alive than Robert Downey Jr. I cannot think of anyone better to play a “tortured genius with a sense of humor” role. He’s excellent in this film.

Jude Law played the straight man role here and was also excellent, setting up Downey for his great moments while also delivering a Watson that was strong and interesting in his own right. His Watson provided the balance to Holmes and they worked well together. If the book Watson was the more frightful of the two, the film Watson was the more personally stable of the two. It worked and gave depth to the comedic bickering between the characters.

If there was a weak performance in the film, it was the one from Rachel McAdams. I just didn’t buy her as a criminal mastermind who had previously outsmarted Holmes on more than one occasion. It might be more realistic that someone with McAdams’s cheerful voice and line delivery could more successfully fool someone than a woman who was more obviously mysterious… but it just didn’t work for me on screen. Neither she nor Downey Jr. had great British accents but while RDJ’s charisma was such that his lack didn’t bother me, her lack did.

The cinematography, costuming and action scenes were excellent and met my high expectations for a Guy Ritchie film. In particular, I enjoyed the opening action sequence when Blackwood was taken down and the multiple fight sequences throughout the movie, especially the climactic one at the film’s end. If you enjoyed Ritchie’s earlier films – like Snatch or Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels – you will probably enjoy the action scenes here, too.

The screenplay was well-written. As with the books, I did not entirely know what was going on or what to expect until we were well into the story. Ritchie injected his own sense of humor and aesthetic on the source material without removing the sense that I was inhabiting a world created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The movie was in some ways darker than I was expecting, with the antagonist planning to take over a seemingly Satanic order that secretly ran (runs?) the British Empire, with a plot to invade and conquer the Civil War weakened United States should the plan in the U.K. succeed. I mean, when you’re so evil that the Satanic secret society is seeking out Holmes for help in dealing with you, you’re pretty evil, right?

The movie gets a PG-13 rating. I understand how it avoided an R rating (there’s not a lot of bad language or sexual innuendo), but it did not avoid an R by much. We see multiple murders – a man set on fire, a man who drowns in a bath, and ultimately we witness the bad guy dying, too. Ritchie delivers a grim panned out shot of Blackwood’s corpse as it dangles from a chain, high up in the air, near the end of the film. I don’t recommend this movie for younger viewers and definitely not for sensitive viewers.

Overall, as an introduction to a franchise goes, this was well done and I enjoyed it. I think fans of the books will appreciate the adaptation choices, where the characterizations deviate from the source material, as well as the mostly excellent casting. The Brit audiences might not appreciate the imperfectly delivered accents, but I thought Robert Downey Jr.’s performance mostly made up for it.

Have you seen Sherlock Holmes? If so, what did you think?