Sherlock Holmes

Having not seen much of the original Sherlock Holmes series it is difficult for me to write any comparisons to the new big budget blockbuster which I know would be the likely thing to do when reviewing a remake.

So, I watched this film not really knowing what to expect, I was definitley very curious to see what effect Guy Ritchie would have on this old classic. What he has managed to do is make a film which is old fashioned but has a modern feel.

Robert Downey jnr is lively and fun to watch and does a really convincing job of Sherlock Holmes (or what i imagine the original Holmes to be like).

The film is around 1 hour and 30 minutes long and sees detective Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey jnr)and his partner Watson (Jude law) engage in a battle of wits and brawn with a nemesis (Mark Strong) whose plot is a threat to all of England.

The movie is structured essentially as an adventure romance, as Holmes and Watson try to break up and, through crooked schemes and explosions and near escapes, realize by the end how much they mean to one another after all. At the beginning Watson is preparing to move out of 221b Baker Street, with plans to propose to pretty and proper Mary (Kelly Reilly) and leave the detective business entirely. Holmes, bored and hilariously jealous, attempts to sabotage Watson's engagement and also draw him back into the game, now that an old closed case has suddenly reopened.

Dipping into chemistry and pentagrams and the earliest forms of electricity, the plot is all over the place, and I'm not entirely certain I understand how it all fit together in the end. But the story really just provides a vehicle for the action and the fantastic character interactions, one of which delivers slightly better than the other. While some action setpieces, like a fight at a shipyard and the final race against the clock, are brilliantly structured, the fight choreography gets chopped up into bits, with Ritchie cutting too quickly for the audience to see a punch or a kick all the way through. The editing often works directly at odds with Downey Jr.'s physicality, as he throws in a funny movement or a particularly sweet punch, only to see it lost entirely to needless slo-mo and quick cuts.

Then again, all that Ritchie noodling works great in Holmes's investigation scenes, allowing him visual flashbacks to all the clues that led him to his conclusions and avoiding the dreadful slowness that comes with most mystery-solving monologues.

As the movie winds down it begins to brazenly set up a sequel, and given the manifold adventures of Holmes and Watson that Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, it's hard to imagine two heroes better suited to a modern franchise.