Movie Reviews: "Sherlock Holmes"

[JamesG]

U.K. Movie Reviews: Sherlock Holmes

The British have had a first look at Sherlock Holmes, Guy Ritchie's reimagining of their country's most famous and beloved fictional detective, played -- egad, Watson! -- by an American, Robert Downey Jr.


The verdict of film critic Marc Lee in the Telegraph: "It is undeniably a rollicking romp, an all-action blockbuster," he writes.

"Doubts about the casting of Downey in the title role are dispelled from the start. He is engaging and convincing within the role (the accent is spot-on), although whether this is a character Conan Doyle might have recognized is another matter."


David Hayle in the London Times referred to the many "delicious scenes" in the film, while the trade publication Screen Daily forecast that the movie, which had its premiere in London Monday night and will open in the U.S. next week, "seems poised to become a sizable hit."


An altogether different verdict is delivered by Catherine Shoard in the Guardian, who calls the movie a "high-end hack work."

As for Downey, who plays Holmes, and Jude Law, who plays his sidekick Dr. Watson, "they're both a pain: the former a cartoon with darting eyes rather than a brain, the latter just a blank."

-IMDB News

[tv star collector]

For me, Basil Rathbone will always be the one-and-only Sherlock Holmes.

[PlayOn]

When we went to see 'The Princess and the Frog', I got a popcorn that had Watson on the bag. Thought it about him (how he met Sherlock, etc.) Didn't know it was a Sherlock movie.
Anyway, sounds great.

[JamesG]

Movie Reviews: Sherlock Holmes

Most critics agree that the new Sherlock Holmes remains an intellectual superman -- just as he was in the original Conan Doyle stories.

He's also a physical superman, too.


A.O. Scott in the New York Times remarks that "the chief innovation" of the Sherlock Holmes movie is that Holmes is "in addition to everything else, a brawling, head-butting, fist-in-the-gut, knee-in-the-groin action hero," all of which results in a movie that is "intermittently diverting."

Of course, Downey has played a full-fledged action hero in Iron Man, Joe Morgenstern notes in the Wall Street Journal, so "it's great fun to watch him [as Holmes] do the detective work he always does, finding laughs and bright surprises in every scene."

Writes Lisa Kennedy in the Denver Post: "This is not your grandparents', or even your parents', Holmes. Vim and vigor have been restored to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famously cerebral master of deduction."

Likewise, Peter Howell in the Toronto Star, while finding fault with the script and the direction, writes that Downey "is arguably more true to Doyle's vision than Basil Rathbone's enduring pipe smoker of earlier films."

And Joy Tipping in the Dallas Morning News gives the movie her unqualified praise. "Despite the deviations from writer Arthur Conan Doyle's version of his hero, however, I strongly suspect the author would have approved of the script's originality and excitement. This is rip-roaring action-adventure of high order, a sometimes dizzying but ultimately thrilling display of showmanship on the part of the actors, director and screenwriters."


But Kyle Smith in the New York Post is not at all pleased by what the filmmakers have done to Holmes. The movie, he writes, "dumbs down a century-old synonym for intelligence with S&M gags, witless sarcasm, murky bombast and twirling action-hero moves that belong in a ninja flick."

Most of the movie, he concludes, "could scarcely have been more off-base if Sherlock had worn a backwards Yankee cap instead of a deerstalker and Watson had inquired of him, 'What up, Holmes?'"


Claudia Puig in USA Today is less censorious, but she nevertheless sums up: "While this incarnation has visual flair and attitude, it is too modern, and it blithely jettisons Holmes' wit and wisdom."

-IMDB News