![]() He’s babbling rather than incisive, and the imaginative attempts to convey his methods through annotated previsualisations of fight moves or montages of clues reduce clear reasoning to some sort of Rain Man savantry. But Downey doesn’t even aspire to the stature of Holmes – he’s shorter than Jude Law’s Watson, and often seems like the Good Doctor’s comedy sidekick – and can’t summon anything like authority. There have been basket case Holmeses before: latterly, even Jeremy Brett played him as a drug-addled loon (to preserve a family rating and avoid evoking the star’s earlier troubles, the cocaine usage is unmentioned here), and a run of films, from Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes onwards, have dug into the darker side of the deductive superhero. ![]() If he were a new character – a Sherlock wannabe – the film would play better, but wouldn’t then be able to trade on the lingering name recognition value of Arthur Conan Doyle’s character. If anything, this detective is a return to Downey’s breakthrough role as Chaplin and comes across as the Little Tramp playing Indiana Jones. It has lovely period detail, well-conceived daring-do, a pulp pastiche plot and a great deal of brio, but – and it’s a slap-in-the-face but – Robert Downey Jr’s scruffy, bipolar, clownish blunderer isn’t a remotely credible Sherlock Holmes. If the hero of Guy Ritchie’s new movie were called Nick Carter, Sexton Blake or Richard Hannay, it would rate as super festive season entertainment. ![]() It’s up to an ingenious, two-fisted detective, his stalwart sidekick and a femme fatale with mixed motives to save the day – after jolly good punch-ups, spectacular explosions, startling deductive speeches and a duel on the still-unfinished upper tier of the new Tower Bridge. He goes to the gallows, but returns to life and continues his seemingly-supernatural reign of terror, which is supposed to culminate in a terrorist atrocity (involving a new-fangled chemical weapon) that will strike at the heart of the British Empire. Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong), a dastardly Victorian villain with a Hitler haircut and pantomime King Rat teeth (and dress sense), is apprehended just as he is about to sacrifice a maiden in a Masonic ritual under London. My reviews/notes on Guy Ritchie’s Holmes films.
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