Sherlock Holmes: Brilliant Yet Stupid (2009)

Stars: Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law

Director: Guy Ritchie

Plugs: None

In the new film Sherlock Holmes, Robert Downey Jr. takes on the role of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s great detective. Holmes, along with Dr. Watson, square off against the menacing and mysterious Lord Blackwood, and foil his plot to murder a young woman during an arcane ritual. Blackwood is then hanged, but apparently comes back to life with plans to lead a secret magic-based cult to global domination. Soon the game is afoot.

The idea of Robert Downey Jr. playing the Victorian-era British supersleuth has raised many an eyebrow. Can he pull it off? What will modern audiences make of him in the role? Actually, the pundits needn’t have worried, for two reasons. First, most modern American audiences have had little exposure to the Holmes character, much less other actors’ interpretations of the role, so they have nothing to compare Downey to. Second, Downey fills the role—what there is of it—just fine. His Holmes is quick of mind and quick of fist, with a little rake thrown in for good measure. Jude Law plays Holmes’s trusted companion Dr. Watson fairly faithfully, which mostly consists of reluctantly running after Holmes so he doesn’t get his fool self killed and bickering with Holmes as though he’s a closeted crush.

The two main characters are fine, but the film veers off course with the introduction of a badly miscast Rachel McAdams as Irene Adler, a woman from Holmes’s past. She’s (allegedly) as brilliant as Sherlock Holmes, and a jewel thief and a spy and probably an astronaut or something as well. She’s supposed to be his romantic foil, but is completely unbelievable and merely clutters up an already messy script with a perfunctory beautiful femme fatale whose affections are supposed to deaden Holmes’s powers of deduction.

The film follows Holmes as he meticulously pokes around crime scenes and pieces together the puzzle, but little of it is explained to the audience until the last few scenes, and even then rather inadequately. We don’t actually see Holmes doing much investigation or real deduction; instead he simply spouts a series of observations (such as concluding that a faint spot of chalk dust on a jacket means the person is employed as a classroom instructor—or perhaps he recently visited a bakery and got a pinch of flour on his lapel while eating a muffin?).

The fundamental problem with Sherlock Holmes is that the brilliant title character is stuck inertly in an aggressively stupid film. Some films can be enjoyable despite their inherent stupidity (Jackass and 2012 come to mind as wildly diverse examples). But if you’re going to have Sherlock Holmes in a film, that script should be intelligent, or at least intelligible. Sherlock Holmes is neither; it needed at least another few rewrites, and screenwriters Michael Robert Johnson, Anthony Peckham, and Simon Kinberg should be embarrassed to have their names on this script. This isn’t National Treasure or The DaVinci Code or Die Hard; this is Sherlock Holmes.

Did Blackwell really come back from the dead? Is Irene really in love with Holmes, or spying on him? What’s with the red-haired dwarf? How do pentagrams and pig carcasses fit into all this? Why does Irene’s accent come and go? Who cares? Sherlock Holmes has one of those ridiculously convoluted Rube Goldberg type plots in which the only way any of it makes sense is if one or more characters knew exactly what one or more of the other characters would do before they did it. The elaborate “explanations” for the different aspects of the mystery are farfetched, though the script tries to make it seem like Holmes is so smart and so ahead of the audience that his deductions are pure genius.

In fact, the opposite is true: the audience is smarter than Sherlock Holmes, for the utter silliness of the plot is plain as day. I almost wanted Holmes to break the fourth wall, address the camera and audience directly, and acknowledge the story’s ridiculousness with a knowing wink.

Sherlock Holmes was directed by Guy Ritchie, known for action films full of violence and quick edits. Ritchie’s main interest obviously lies in the periodic fight and action scenes, and his impatience with all the quasi-sensical plot talky-talk in between is evident. The film is interesting to look at and well shot, the production design is well done, and the scenes (at least the ones that aren’t obviously computer generated) look pretty good. Sadly, it’s mostly for naught. Casting Downey as Sherlock Holmes by itself is not necessarily a sacrilege, nor is exploring his macho physicality (though updating the character with kung fu moves is pushing it). But shoehorning the world’s most famous detective into a film with far more action than logic is going a bit too far.

Sherlock Holmes isn't a bad movie, it's just not a very good one. Somewhere in Hollywood, on some dusty shelf in some studio’s archives or under some seedy agent’s desk, there’s probably a script that would make a good new Sherlock Holmes film, with or without Robert Downey Jr. Unfortunately, this isn’t it.