Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes (2009)


68% on Rotten Tomatoes (out of 186 reviews)

Runtime: 128 minutes

Directed by: Guy Ritchie

Starring: Robert Downey, Jr., Jude Law, Rachel McAdams, Mark Strong, Robert Maillet

From: Warner Brothers/Village Roadshow/Silver Pictures

Here’s something I was going to mention for the last review but I’ll state it here instead. Pro wrestling was obviously inspired by The Road Warrior. Besides the famous Road Warriors (i.e. Legion of Doom) tag team, there’s Lord Humungus and how there was a masked wrestler in the Southeast known as Lord Humungous, and then his outfit was clearly the inspiration for the costumes for another great 80’s tag team, Demolition.

Well, there’s a wrestling connection here too with this flick. Robert Maillet was a former wrestler, best known as being briefly in the WWF in the late 90’s as Kurrgan. He was pretty awful, even considering he’s a legit 7 feet tall guy, but I wonder why he didn’t become an actor sooner, as his interaction here with Downey reminded me of Bond vs. Jaws in The Spy Who Loved Me, and indeed, if he wanted to be he could be the Richard Kiel of our generation.

But, besides that and the interesting musical score that seemed to fit the Victorian England setting pretty well, I didn’t care for this flick too much.

The main things were that I didn’t like the characters nor the story; those are kind of major things, so that’s that. I couldn’t stand the Holmes character at all, as he was a drugged up drunk loser who was totally reprehensible; I don’t care about anyone saying that’s how Sherlock was in the novels, as I haven’t read them and I’m sure most people know him from those old British movies. I have no idea why Watson kept on being by his side even though Sherlock almost always treat him like crap; it almost seemed like a battered wife sort of thing… seriously, not that I noticed it myself as I’m not a deviant like that, but others on messageboards have stated that there was a gay subtext between Holmes and Watson and given that, amongst other things, Sherlock for no reason at all dicks around and tries to prevent Watson from marrying his wife to be, so maybe they’re on to something there… so yes, I didn’t like any of the characters, not just the main ones.

Then, the story… it’s actually supernatural, which caught me off-guard (I didn’t pay much attention to the trailers), and it becomes more and more preposterous as it goes through a series of set-pieces (rather than any sort of plot that moves fluidly, it goes from one set-piece to another) and the ending… it is SO ridiculous and laughable. Sherlock is a bright guy, yeah, but he knows an encyclopedia’s worth of information on a variety of things SO broad and vast that just so happen to be a part of the story, and the fact that he just so happens to know all of this, it’s rather convenient and not something that I can believe. Besides the fact that Sherlock is an 1880’s version of an MMA fighter, he apparently also has mind-reading abilities and can see into the future and past; that’s the only way I can explain some parts of the story, and I have an easier time believing that the story was one thing rather than the way it turned out (to state it as vaguely as I can without spoiling anything). So, I didn’t like the story either. Mix in some action that can be hard to follow sometimes due to the God-awful new way action scenes are usually filmed where you rarely can make out what’s going on, and some rather horrid acting from Rachel McAdams where I couldn’t tell most of the time whether her character was supposed to be sarcastic and Holmes wasn’t supposed to know it, whether she was sarcastic and he WAS supposed to know she was BS’ing, or what, but it wasn’t a good performance from her at all (the other performances in this film were fine, I thought). That one performance didn’t help matters.

So, once again I’m baffled as to the high praise it’s gotten from many places, as like with District 9, it just turned me off and I didn’t like it, although at least it didn’t make me as mad as District 9 did. But, I recommend that you don’t see it. Check back this time next week for at least one new review.