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 In cinemas Boxing Day [M]
Director: Guy Ritchie
Runtime: 128mins.
I’m not a big fan of the forensics police-procedural. Sure, Mulder and Scully dabbled in the odd autopsy, but these were generally complementary to the plot, as is the science in the mostly good Law & Order franchises and clones. But the CSI-aesthetic – whether perpetrated by the perennially constipated Horatio Caine or that congenital moron Gil Grissom – has always been a little too much to bear, especially with impossibly generous police department budgets staffed by chiselled, buffed and polished coppers who patronise their audience with elaborate explanations that ultimately clog real-life courts with numbskull jurors demanding unnecessary and expensive gunshot residue and DNA tests.
So I was a little nervous when Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes began to occasionally lapse into slow-motion action scenes narrated by Holmes himself (Robert Downey Jr.), as the great detective plans out the series of blows – along with the resulting damage – that will take down an opponent; or when Holmes explains his process of deduction, along with the requisite flashbacks. But Ritchie made his film for the broadest possible audience, and many of them – for whatever strange reason – are fans of Grissom et al. The surprise comes in the fact that Sherlock Holmes circa 2009 is actually a lot of fun, with the sometimes laboured exposition mostly forgivable.
As the film opens, Holmes and Watson put an end to the dramatic and fatal mysticism of Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong), who has left a trail of murders in his wake. With Blackwood on Death Row, and no new cases in sight, the reappearance of the deadly vixen Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams) in Holmes’s life guarantees complication.
Ritchie’s Holmes is a shameless reprobate, with Downey Jr. drawing on his various performances of characters like Iron Man’s alter ego, playboy Tony Stark, or the drug-fucked Barris in A Scanner Darkly, and most likely, his own colourful life as a drug addict and alcoholic. In between occasional cases of detection, Holmes happily drinks himself into a stupor, fights in bare-knuckled boxing matches, and terrorises his neighbours with explosions. His partner in fighting crime is the slightly more urbane Dr Watson (Jude Law), who tempers his civilised exterior with a gambling addiction, an affection for pistols and swordplay, and dreams of the day that he might be free of his friend and tormentor, and married to his delightful love, Mary (Kelly Reilly).
This is all a lot of fun, with lots of explosions, fights, action, intrigue, and wordplay. The purists might be appalled, but they were never really part of Ritchie’s equation anyway. Elementary, really.
***
TIM MILFULL
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