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Despite a few laggard moments of slow going, Ritchie has pulled off an entertaining coup in giving us a Holmes for the 21st century by digging back to the 19th century original and adding a few bells and whistles.
What was the thinking behind all this?
It's all knotted together, then unraveled with brio, by Holmes and Watson. There are fisticuffs galore, fiery combustion aplenty, and, yes, my dear reader, clever deduction.
The very idea of handing him over to professional lad Guy Ritchie, to be played as a punch-throwing quipster by Robert Downey Jr., is so profoundly stupid one can only step back in dismay.
Downey never winks -- heâ(TM)s too much of a pro for that -- but like the man heâ(TM)s playing, heâ(TM)s much, much smarter than the movie heâ(TM)s in.
By now we've seen so many good, bad, and indifferent Sherlocks that it's almost a relief to get something different, however wrongheaded. And there's no such thing as too much Downey.
... Bears the stamp of its director, Guy Ritchie, much more so than that of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ...
The plot races and roars through a deliciously grungy combination of real sets and CGI for all sorts of big-action scenes in and around turn-of-the-century London.
Ritchie provides big dumb fun, but it's hard to imagine worse casting than Bob Downey, Jr. Maybe Verne Troyer or RuPaul. Downey's self-important bluster and lousy accent ruin the film. But pleasing score from Hans Zimmer's team.
Proof that Guy Richie can still make good films, though it's not without flaws.
Purists can, and certainly will, spend much time arguing how much is true to the material and how much was changed but the rest won't, and shouldn't care. The fact is, Sherlock Holmes is just down right entertaining.
Ultimately, it achieves what it sets out to do: to entertain.
Although Ritchie's itchy camera finger causes confusion in the more kinetic action sequences, Downey and Law take the film far enough into buddy film territory to make the misfires easily forgotten
Sherlock Holmes has something for everybody; an accessible film is exactly what Guy Ritchie's been looking for.
In a year in which actioners featured robots with arthritis and sinking ice, Sherlock Holmes might as well be considered a work of genius.
Le film de Guy Ritchie livre la marchandise, même s'il semble souvent pris entre deux époques...
Elementary, My dear readers. But not in a nice way.
Ritchie doesn't disappoint, and, if you go in with modest expectations, neither does Sherlock Holmes.
Like Ritchie's best films, this gets the job done as both an intriguing plot puzzle and a bouncy, entertaining romp.
It's entertaining, but it's also a bit goofy -- Holmes here is a Victorian 007.
Guy's flaky Sherlock on acid slapstick yarn mixes the mystical and macabre, with its own insane inner logic that might be a headscratcher even for Holmes. So best to just savor Downey's cartoonish conspiracy theorist and Victorian busybody gumshoe.
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