Hoyts, Melbourne Central 5/1/2010
Rather than adapt one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s multitude of published Holmes stories, the team of screenwriters (and boy is a team of screenwriters ever a bad sign) have written an entirely new and completely absurd scenario. (One writer was also responsible for Jumper, X-Men 3: The Last Stand and xXx 2 – you’ve been warned.)
The film is saved from terribleness, however, by Robert Downey Jnr (Iron Man) and Jude Law (Gattaca) who don’t seem to notice how silly it all is and compellingly deliver some otherwise underwhelming dialogue.
I had liked Guy Ritchie’s style for his earliest films, and liked that he made very English films in a new and interesting way. Here, I’m afraid, he just makes an English film the way Americans do. The main reason we know the bad guy is a bad guy is not because he intends to kill hundreds of Englishmen, but because he intends to return the newly independent American colonies to English rule – gasp!
The plot may well be the most preposterous and convoluted of the coming year, but for the most part the film charges along at such a clip you don’t notice. Only when it slows down (which it does, sadly, more than once) does the ridiculousness of it all catch up.