Guy Ritchie | 128 mins | Blu-ray | 12 / PG-13
“Oh my God, what have they done to Sherlock Holmes?!” Etc etc. By this point you’re likely to have heard the arguments that Guy Ritchie’s blockbuster re-imagining of the Great Detective is actually based on all sorts of references and allusions in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original works, so I won’t go over them again here. Indeed, I’m not even convinced they’re relevant in the first place.
You see, it’s true — Ritchie and co have turned grumpy old romance-free Holmes into a comedic action hero with a love interest. But he still has the brilliant mind, he still has a mystery to solve, and that love interest is Irene Adler, “the one that got away” from one of Conan Doyle’s earliest Holmes tales. Perhaps this isn’t such an unfaithful Holmes after all.
And actually, the mysteries Holmes solves make some of the film’s most interesting bits. Numerous murders and impossible escapes make up the narrative, slipping by almost unnoticed in the main plot; but, come the climax, in true detective story fashion Holmes has an explanation for how every one was done. There’s the equivalent of Poirot gathering all the suspects together to explain it to them, only in Ritchie’s blockbusterised version of a classic detective story this takes place atop a half-built Tower Bridge with the villain dangling precariously over his doom.
The way to this climax offers a good mix of detecting, action and humour. It’s not pure Holmes then, but it’s not pure blockbuster either. Downey Jr brings some of his Tony Stark magic, but his take on Holmes is still distinct, not just because of his faultless English accent. His madness, obsession and genius are all well portrayed, and Ritchie’s direction matches it beautifully.
Some of the early scenes make for the most perfect evocation of Holmes I’ve seen on screen, such as when he’s in a restaurant and the sheer volume of noise becomes too much, thankfully broken when his guests arrive; or the fight sequences, where we listen as he meticulously plans every last move in super-slow-mo — all shot for real in-camera, incidentally — before executing them in a matter of seconds. The Matrix-esque slow-mo punches and what have you may have looked derivative in the trailer, but in context they’re bang on.
Though this is Downey Jr’s film, most of the cast are up to the task. Even Jude Law, who I’m no fan of, makes for a decent sidekick of a Watson, his shoot-first characterisation contrasting with Holmes’ thoughtful care better than the regular question-asking audience-cypher.
Mark Strong’s villain is suitably chilling, aided by the film’s irreverence: if they can make Holmes into a quip-dealing action man, maybe there really is something supernatural at work? To reveal the truth would spoil that proper climax. The closest to a weak link is Rachel McAdams’ Irene Adler. I like McAdams well enough generally, and here too, but she may still be a little out of her depth — they’ve gone for a Pretty Young Thing when someone a little older may’ve suited better.
The closing moments set up a sequel in the most blatant way possible — if Batman Begins‘s Joker card is a brief, subtle indication, Sherlock Holmes‘s equivalent would be to have Batman and Gordon debating who this Joker feller might be and what he might want for a couple of minutes. It’s a bit too much, if you ask me, particularly as the Joker in question (oh, you all know who it is) isn’t actually seen — rumours of a famous cameo prove to be false.
And so what we find with this new Sherlock Holmes is an entertaining blockbuster, but with enough ‘proper Holmes’ laced underneath to make it feel different, unique even. 
Ritchie brings something special to the director’s chair too, believe it or not — you may think he’s sold out into blockbusterdom to revive his flagging and repetitive career, but the touches he brings suggest the mind of someone who has control of his material, his camera and his edit, and wants to use them all to try something a bit different, not just another hack-for-hire who could churn out any old template-hewn action/adventure flick.
Perhaps it’s a little long in places. That might be my only complaint. And yet, for that, I’m certainly looking forward to Sherlock Holmes 2.
Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’ modern-day re-imagining of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock, starts at 9pm tonight on BBC One.
Sherlock Holmes placed 8th on my list of The Ten Best Films I Saw For the First Time in 2010, which can be read in full here.
From the company that brought you such pinnacles of cinematic excellence as 
But, in The Asylum’s favour, their Sherlock Holmes doesn’t hide what it is. Yes, it’s called simply Sherlock Holmes rather than Sherlock Holmes and the Implausible CGI Monsters, but at least said monsters are plastered all over the DVD cover (both US and UK). If you see that and still expect something faithful to Conan Doyle, more fool you. That said, at times it’s surprisingly faithful to Doyle’s spirit. There’s some decent-ish investigation and deduction, the story structured like a mystery rather than an action-adventure.
Anachronisms abound, the best being the first: the film opens in London, 1940, the middle of the Blitz, and the opening shot foregrounds the Millennium Bridge. I don’t think you have to be too familiar with London to know when that was built. Elsewhere we get intercoms on houses, incongruous light switches and period inaccurate telephones, just to mention a couple. It’s shoddy, yes, but almost part of the fun.
Is 1945-1998 actually a film? Or is it a piece of video Art? Or just another online video?
attention didn’t already wander, that is). There are ultimately so many flashes and bleeps, and the effect is so lulling, that I had to force myself to remember these represented Big Nasty Bombs that were Not A Good Thing. Perhaps something more aurally grating would’ve been appropriate; the counter argument going that this would cause even more viewers to abandon the work.
Is Anybody There? has been described as “lightweight” in some reviews. Tosh and piffle — I don’t think that’s true in the slightest, and it’s left this rather excellent film to be distinctly underrated.
initially antagonistic relationship merges seamlessly into a deep friendship and respect; one that doesn’t go unchallenged, but survives it all to make them both better people.
It’s a well-balanced film that hits that genuinely realistic note: life is rarely all comedy or all tragedy, and more often than not the most hilarious moments are locked up inside the most unbearable. It’s a truth a few more drama writers could productively learn, instead of remaining so insufferably po-faced because they’re creating a Serious And Meaningful Dramatic Work.
I was a bit of a gamer once. Not an especially hardcore one, but certainly a gamer. And I remember Max Payne, and I remember enjoying it, and I remember thinking it would make quite a good film, and I remember one of the biggest problems being that what made it so unique as a game was the bullet-time feature and what would make it so derivative as a film would be to use bullet-time. But it also had lots of other things going for it: the snow-bound nighttime New York setting, the dark revenge plot, the hard-boiled gravel-toned voiceover.
Unfortunately, he seems to be under the illusion that a couple of barely-moving slow-mo moments also stand in for a full action sequence. When an action movie can’t deliver any action, there’s a problem.
The ‘harder’ bit merely comes from a couple of frames (literally) of violence and the odd bit of CG blood. Presumably the extra walking around is to artificially lengthen the running time and persuade the more gullible that they’re getting a tougher experience.
At least some of it looks quite nice. The drifting snow-laden exterior shots are among the few bits of the film that might genuinely be considered good. But when you can get pretty images elsewhere, why suffer through this?
In the special features on The International’s Blu-ray, director Tom Tykwer comments that architecture is a focus of his when making a film. It certainly shows here: there are many, many lingering shots of buildings (and just about everything else, actually), all very modern, with straight, clean, crisp lines. The cinematography matches it in pin-sharp perfection, which at least means the Blu-ray image is a pleasure to watch. The film itself, however, is a little dull.
Not that her continued presence would’ve improved the film’s final act. The ultimate resolution is half brave and half cop-out: the goodies fail in bringing the baddies down, the film explicit in the fact that such business will always continue; and yet most of the baddies are dispatched, one way or another, and a closing array of newspaper headlines serves to imply that the law got the Big Bad Bank after all. As “have your cake and eat it” endings go, it’s a damp squib.
The filmmaking skill Tykwer exhibits during this one action sequence, plus the beauty with which he shoots international scenery, suggests he’s the perfect director to take over the Bourne franchise (should that rumble on). He already seems to be borrowing from it, including the choice to underscore all his long, slow shots with punchy, driving music, as if this in itself will give the film some dynamism. It doesn’t. Though The International may occasionally remind you of that trilogy, then, it doesn’t come close in the entertainment stakes.
Pale Rider is, in many ways, a pretty stock Western. The plot is likely to be familiar even to those who haven’t seen a great deal of the genre: remote community, where some controlling business-type is making life hard for a bunch of everyday poor grafters; in rides a mysterious stranger, who sees the injustice of the situation; when peaceful methods don’t work, there’s the climactic shoot-out; and the mysterious stranger finally rides into the sunset/from whence he came/forever on.
but the person he has in mind is dead… and yet, when they come face to face, the marshall repeatedly utters, “it is you”.
the only particularly memorable role is Sydney Penny’s naïve young teenager, Megan. Her shifting emotions and variable actions are perhaps the only parts of the story one can’t necessarily see coming from the off.
Readers may remember that I opened my 
Mac and Kutcher play the roles they always play— No, actually, in fairness, I can’t say that: I think I’ve only seen Mac in the 
It’s as recognisable from TV sitcoms — 
It’s generally taken as a rule that an original film is better than the remake, particularly so if that original is in a language other than English and the remake is American. But there’ll always be something to buck the trend, and in my view that’s Insomnia.
surprised how little his lack of sleep had to do with anything. Here, there are several scenes of Skarsgard struggling to sleep, he’s visibly rougher as the film progresses, and it seems to impact his judgement and sense of what’s going on more than in Nolan’s film. If the other character elements are apparently less developed, this is something the original does better.
Although Disney have recently treated (I use the word loosely) us to a glut of films based on theme park attractions, movies adapted from good old board games seem a lot rarer. This is probably for good reason — even more so than Disney rides, the majority have no kind of useable narrative. Cluedo (aka Clue in the US) is one of the few that does, and consequently is one of the few (only?) board games that has reached the silver screen. So far, anyway.
Other than the board game connection, Clue is best known for its three different endings, all of which were released, with each screening having just one attached. On TV the film shows with all three consecutively, and they perhaps work best this way — there’s a rising scale of ridiculousness, and the varied repetition of a couple of gags underlines rather than steals their amusement value. My personal favourite variant was the first, incidentally.
100Films.co.uk 