Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.
So says Guy Ritchie's noisy, exhaustive Sherlock Holmes, which damns the Arthur Conan Doyle iconography and forges ahead with its steam-punk reinvention of the droll British sleuth as a bare-chested action rogue, fight-club frequenter, utility-belt-wearing superhero and absent-minded mad scientist.
This deductive pugilist doesn't have a gentleman's bone in his body.
And his London, far from the sterile drawing rooms of yore, is a patchwork of cobbled streets, dank alleyways, filthy beggars and skeletal iron super-structures.
Purists will be appalled, but everyone else will be sufficiently amused.
So what if Ritchie, the director of such Cockney crime yarns as Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, doesn't so much re-invent Holmes as borrow the name for a film more inspired by Pirates of the Caribbean than The Hound of the Baskervilles?
As shallow, overlong Hollywood vehicles go, this opening chapter of a would-be franchise is energetic, well-acted and just astute enough to merit a pass.
It begins excitingly -- thick with eerie Victorian atmosphere, shrouded figures and barely lit catacombs -- as Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) and Watson (Jude Law) interrupt a human sacrifice and capture Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong), the satanic fiend responsible for a series of ghastly murders in 1891 London. But nothing here is elementary.
Behind Blackwood's string of killings are Da Vinci Code-style machinations and soon Holmes isn't just solving homicides, but saving the world from a megalomaniac who wants to rule England and reclaim America.
Blackwood is so bent on global domination, in fact, that after he's hanged, he even returns from the grave to finish the job, putting bickering old married couple Holmes and Watson in the midst of a knotty conspiracy involving secret societies, bizarre experiments and the destruction of Parliament.
If that sounds like a lot to make sense of for what's essentially an exercise in explosive velocity, the screenwriters don't bother trying.
Instead, the convoluted script is intended only as mortar slapped between action sequences.
Even Rachel McAdams as potential paramour Irene Adler -- the only woman to have bested Holmes -- is drowned out as Ritchie steadily cranks the volume.
Gliding above it all, though, is Downey, who may not be terribly convincing as a Victorian Englishman, but whose crazy-cool persona suits this Holmes as well as deerstalker hats did his cinematic predecessors.
Like Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow, Downey is nimble enough to half-wink at the absurdity of this big-budget behemoth without appearing smug or bored.
In fact, the chemistry between Downey and Law -- who is rarely this good -- is the film's purest pleasure. (Although one so-called "Ritchie-ism" -- in which slow-motion editing allows us a mind's eye view of how Holmes approaches a physical opponent -- represents the kind of character-driven visual gusto I wish there had been more of.)
Less enjoyable? The overbearing commercial ambitions of the filmmakers, who shoehorn in a Professor Moriarty subplot that exists solely to lay the foundation for further adventures.
Apparently they're thinking sequel. Like we didn't know that already.
(This film is rated PG)
More Movie Reviews
