Sherlock Holmes

The most famous sleuth of them all makes a cinematic comeback – this time in the sculpted shape of Robert Downey Jr. Paul Martin wonders if long-time fans of the Baker Street fiddler-twiddler will be able to recognise their hero though, as director Guy Ritchie slots him into an action buddy adventure which is more redolent of the 1980s than it is the 1890s.

Hi there movie lovers! Joel Silver here. That’s right, uber-producer of Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, Predator, The Matrix, and other films with casualty lists long enough to make the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre look like a friggin’ baby shower. And I’m here today to tell you all about my latest blockbuster movie, Sherlock Holmes. Yeah, you better believe it! Artie Conan Doyle’s gumshoe has been given the Silver treatment and boy oh boy oh boy, do Holmes and his bro John Watson ever get to kick some limey ass in this baby!

Not that I, Long Joel Silver, can hog all the credit for transforming those crazy crime-bustin’ cats from the lily-livered tea sippers they were in the days of ol’ Basil Rathbone, into the kind of proactive action heroes who can anchor an $80million event movie. I knew I needed a top director on this one, someone who could inject some toughness back into Holmes, who would drag him out of the friggin’ drawin’ room and back onto the mean streets of Victorian London. And, just like Holmes, I got my man – Mr. Guy Ritchie. He’s Hollywood’s one-stop, go-to Guy for London crime films. Especially after RocknRolla showed his talent wasn’t deader than all those faceless extras in my movies, it had just been on one hell of a long vacation. Oh sure, the stylized way Ritchie shoots some of his fight sequences, in slow-motion with missing frames, is almost as annoying as all his ex-wife’s music from the last decade, but whatcha gonna do about it?

The big challenge Guy and I had was making Holmes and Watson relevant to a young modern demographic. Because if you’re not relevant to a young modern demographic then you’re box-office toast, and Joel Silver does not like being box-office toast. Our first step in achieving this was the casting; we needed to make these two limeys fuckable. So obviously the easiest solution was to cast an American in the title role. We landed ourselves Robert Downey Jr., who cuts quite a dash as Holmes, playing him like a mix of his characters in Chaplin and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Plus he’s got great hair. We figured we better get an actual Brit for Watson, so we hired Jude Law. His last hit movie might’ve been around the time Good Queen Vic was still on the throne, but he does have hair almost as neat as RDJ’s. And I gotta say I think Law does pretty well here, though he does still deliver a lot of his lines in that kind of Prince-William-pissed-off-cause-he-lost-a-game-of-billiards whine that makes me wanna jam my boot up his pasty ass.

Actors in place, the key then was nailing the relationship between the duo. We needed spark, tension, conflict - goddamit, we needed bromance! In fact we've ended up with summat not too far removed from my Lethal Weapon movies, with Sherlock as the Martin Riggs-style maverick and Watson as the homebody family man, about to settle down with Kelly Reilly’s Mary, and thereby send his ‘n’ Holmes detective double-act the way of the friggin’ dodo. Injecting a bit more 80s buddy movie flavor into the mix is Eddie Marsan’s Inspector Lestrade, mutated from the diligent lawman of Conan Doyle’s stories into a kinda Beverley Hills Cop/48 Hours angry boss-cop, constantly snarlin’ at all the collateral damage Holmes causes as he tries to nail the bad guy.

And what about that bad guy? Well, Mark Strong plays the evil Lord Blackwood, who is actually dudded up to look a hell of a lot like Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes from British TV. He’s kinda like Aleister Crowley, but not really if you know anything at all about Crowley. Blackwood is a Satanist who seems to have risen from the grave, and possesses strange powers - like being able to reach inside peoples’ heads and make them experience horrific thoughts (for me that would be reading the grosses for Hudson Hawk). He heads up his own Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn-style fraternity too, which extends its influence into the highest echelons of English society; although it basically comes across as a crappy Da Vinci Code rip-off. But what the hell, people don’t come to these movies for the villains do they? Even I can’t remember who the bad guys were in Lethal Weapon 3 and that baby paid for my beach pad in Malibu.

Just between you and me as well, it ain’t only Blackwood who stinks up the supporting cast. We got Rachel McAdams in there as Irene Adler, ‘The Woman’ from Conan Doyle’s A Scandal in Bohemia. She’s supposed to be an alluringly amoral chick, possessor of a checkered past, yet McAdams is so perky and fresh-faced that it’s pretty goddamn difficult to believe she’s ever so much as farted in a crowded elevator. Oh, and while I’m getting things off my chest, the concluding showpiece fight on top of an under-construction Tower Bridge is bathetically lousy.

But our young modern demographic don’t care about any of that. They don’t want memorable plotlines. They don’t want character depth. They don’t want involving stories. They don’t even really want the stuff that does actually work in this Sherlock Holmes movie - like Hans Zimmer’s music, which echoes John Barry’s awesome Ipcress File score. No, our young modern demographic want good-lookin’, light-hearted fun that they don’t need to think about once the credits have rolled, and if they say they want more than that then they must be lying. Because if they did, that would mean that all our highly-paid movie industry focus testers are actually a bunch of friggin’ morons who don’t know anything about anything. And people, let me tell you, if that’s the case then my name ain’t Jumpin’ Joel Silver.

Rating on a scale of 5 defamation lawsuits from Joel Silver’s eye-wateringly expensive attorneys: 3
Release date: Out now
Directed by: Guy Ritchie
Written by: Michael Robert Johnson, Anthony Peckham, Simon Kinberg, Lionel Wigram
Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, Mark Strong, Rachel McAdams
Rating: UK = 12A, US = PG-13
Running time: 128 minutes