Sherlock Holmes: Brilliant detective -- dumb movie

No, not that one.

I'll admit, right up top, that part of my problem with Guy Ritchie's version of Sherlock Holmes is irrational. After all, as someone somewhere has certainly said, "this isn't your father's Holmes." Which of course can be translated as, "yeah, we changed, uh... everything. All we left is the name because, you know, that's good for marketing."

So my problem is with that general idea, which I despise. But strictly in terms of the Holmes character, I shouldn't really care, since I've never read a Holmes book or seen a Holmes movie.

But at the end of the day, a reboot like this isn't as much about how much is changed (The Mask of Zorro changed a lot about Zorro and was still pretty good), but whether the movie itself is, you know, a piece of shit.

Fortunately for everyone involved, Sherlock Holmes is not (at least completely) a piece of shit. But all things considered, it's a pretty lousy movie that gets even worse the more you think about it and the more you compare it to the movies it's trying to be.

For instance:

Plot Point: Holmes and Watson's partnership is coming to an end because Watson is getting married. Holmes uses every opportunity to sabotage Watson's plan to leave.

Done better in: Zero Effect

Starring Bill Pullman and Ben Stiller in a modern takeoff of the Holmes/Watson dynamic (of which, of course, there are many), Zero Effect probes this same assistant-leaving situation in a much more satisfying and motivated way. Pullman's Darryl Zero, for one, is a much weirder and worse boss to Stiller's character than Downey's Holmes is to Watson. Also, Stiller's character is a lawyer and has a fiance who doesn't like Zero.

The point is: he clearly has a future without Zero, making his reluctance to leave him (Zero is helpless without him, and Stiller digs that) an interesting character point to explore.

Jude Law's Watson isn't given anything like this to play. We're simply told he's leaving Holmes' employ for reasons like he's messy and a bad roommate. Why the lack of a real reason? Because it's only there to add some tension and give them something to talk about. Beyond that, the movie can't be bothered to answer.

Plot Point: Holmes is a drug addict of some kind. At one point he's high on something used for "eye surgery," leading to the obvious question, was there really eye surgery in Victorian England?

This will hurt, and then you'll die.

Done better in: House, among other places.

Wikipedia helpfully informs me that Holmes' drug of choice in the original stories was cocaine (then legal in England), injected in a seven percent solution as a way to alleviate his boredom when he wasn't working.

In Sherlock Holmes, he drinks and does (mostly unnamed) drugs, simultaneously flailing about and inventing things, as in one particularly useless scene, where he observes he can get flies to fly in semicircles when he plays discordant notes on his violin.

Unfortunately, the "brilliant man who's also an addict but can somehow keep it together" has been done so many times before that it's hard to do anything new with it, and Sherlock Holmes proves over and over again it's not up to doing anything hard.

In the TV show House (which is based in many ways on the Holmes character), his addiction to painkillers is a direct result of a medical misdiagnosis of an infarction of the leg, making his limp, and his addiction, a constant reminder of the importance of getting the right answer. This is obviously more interesting than a brilliant guy who abuses drugs because he's bored (and when he's not bored, can instantly snap out of it).

At the root of all this is simply a problem of the movie being dumb. Holmes and Watson are supposed to be brilliant and innovative, but instead of gathering clues and deducing things logically, they mostly seem to arrive at a place and say a few things that don't make sense until the bad guys show up, at which point a big fight starts that lasts long enough for the screenwriters to go, "whew, that was close. We almost had to write something clever there."

This is in stark contrast to the best kind of mystery fiction, where the clues are laid at least partially in view, drawing the audience in in their attempt to solve the mystery for themselves. Sherlock Holmes can't be bothered (or the filmmakers simply weren't talented enough) to do that, so the movie decides leaves you in the fucking dark about everything.

For instance (and this is a spoiler), at one point a character is revealed to have not been dead because (you didn't guess it) he had ingested a suppressant derived from a rhododendron plant.

Uh, what? Was there any way for me to know that (they do show a leaf to a rhododendron plant at one point. Or at least, I thought it was a rhododendron plant. It just looked like a leaf to me)? I mean, is such a thing even possible to extract from a rhododendron?

Apparently not.

The whole end of the movie is like that, where in one long, breathless speech, Holmes tries to explain the totally confusing things we've been watching in ways that are either totally implausible or just goddamn made up.

No, we're told. A character didn't spontaneously combust. An odorless, colorless flammable liquid was dropped on him by some kind of Victorian-era rain machine, and his gun was rigged to spark so that he exploded into flames. No, this didn't also ignite the long stream of droplets he left behind him on his way in here. What makes you say that?

You get the idea. As my brother said, "Don't bother to explain it if you're going to do it with bullshit like that. I didn't really need to know."

I'll take it a step further.

I didn't need to see the movie at all.

One and a half stars out of five.

Postscript: it also bears serious noting that in getting the great Robert Downey, Jr. to play Holmes and the also pretty great Jude Law to play Watson, they really had the chance to do something interesting with the material. Having those two actors eschew interesting dialogue in favor of what it by my count at least three fight scenes is a crime to celluloid that someone should be punished for.