- UK release: December 2009
- Director: Guy Ritchie · Writers: Michael Robert Johnson; Anthony Peckham; Simon Kinberg
- Studio / distributor: Warner Bros.; Village Roadshow; Silver Pictures
- Genre: Period action mystery / adventure · Runtime: 128 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- Main cast: Robert Downey Jr (Iron Man, Chaplin) as Sherlock Holmes; Jude Law (The Talented Mr Ripley, Cold Mountain) as Dr John Watson; Rachel McAdams (The Notebook, Mean Girls) as Irene Adler; Mark Strong (Stardust, RocknRolla) as Lord Blackwood
- IMDb: 7.6 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 69% critics / 77% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
The Holmes most of us grew up with sat by the fire in a deerstalker, all cold cerebral calm, whether that was Basil Rathbone being clipped about it or Jeremy Brett making a chilly art of it. Guy Ritchie has other ideas. The man who gave us Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch has taken the most famous detective in English fiction, kept the brilliance and the boredom and the cocaine habit Conan Doyle actually wrote, and bolted on a pair of fists. The result is a Holmes who solves the crime and then wins the fight, and the surprise is how well the two halves sit together.
The setup
Holmes and Watson put a stop to Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong), an aristocrat dabbling in ritual murder and dark theatre, and Blackwood goes to the gallows for it. Then he appears to climb back out of his own grave. London panics, the newspapers froth, and a city already nervous about secret societies and the strange new powers of the industrial age starts to believe a dead man is walking. Holmes does not believe in the supernatural, which leaves him the harder job of working out how a hanged man returns, who profits from the fear, and what the trick is meant to distract everyone from. Watson, meanwhile, is trying to get engaged and move out, which Holmes treats as the real outrage.
The cast
Robert Downey Jr is the engine here. Fresh off making Iron Man a global concern, he plays Holmes as a twitchy, unwashed, half-feral genius, brilliant and insufferable in roughly equal measure, forever three moves ahead of the room and visibly bored by how slow everyone else is. He keeps an English accent and, more impressively, keeps it interesting. Jude Law’s Watson is the quiet triumph of the film. Rather than the bumbling sidekick of decades of adaptation, this is a competent ex-army surgeon with a temper and a gambling habit, a man who can hold a gun and hold his own, and the friction between the two of them, half marriage, half feud, is the thing the film runs on. Rachel McAdams brings a knowing slipperiness to Irene Adler, the one person clever enough to rob Holmes, and Mark Strong does his reliable line in soft-spoken menace as Blackwood. Eddie Marsan’s exasperated Lestrade rounds it out.
The craft
Ritchie’s London is all soot and fog and half-built bridges, a city in the middle of becoming modern and not sure it likes it. Philippe Rousselot shoots it in browns and greys with the grime left in, and the production design leans hard into the machinery of the age, the chemistry, the early electricity, the sense that science itself is the new dark art. Ritchie cannot resist his tricks, the slow-motion fight breakdowns where Holmes narrates each blow before he throws it, the snap zooms, the speed-ramping he has used since his crime films, and a couple of them are showing off. Mostly they earn their place because they externalise the one thing screen Holmes always struggles with: deduction is internal, and here you finally see the man think. Hans Zimmer’s score is the other quiet pleasure, a scratchy, broken-down barrelhouse sound built on detuned banjo and piano that sounds like nothing else he has done and fits the gaslit scruffiness perfectly. It is a film I would happily put on again just for how it moves and sounds.
How it stacks up
The obvious yardstick is the reverent tradition, Rathbone and Brett, and on that measure the purists have a case: this is not a film much interested in the armchair and the magnifying glass. But the better comparison is the Pirates of the Caribbean school of loud, witty, slightly anachronistic period adventure, and against that lot it is sharper and better cast. Set it beside Ritchie’s own crime capers and you can see the same DNA, the same loyalty to a double act, the same delight in a plan clicking into place, only here aimed at a property big enough to hold it. The mystery itself is the weakest link, a touch mechanical once the occult curtain comes down, but the chemistry papers over a lot.
Critics versus the rest of us
The critics are split down the middle, sitting around 69%, with audiences a fair bit warmer at 77%. The recurring complaint is that Ritchie has muscled the mystery out of the way to make an action film, and that a brawling, wisecracking Holmes betrays the character. There is something in the first half of that and very little in the second. Conan Doyle’s Holmes was a boxer, a swordsman and a brawler as well as a thinker, so the fists are less of an invention than the deerstalker purists assume. The audience gap tells the real story: people are enjoying this more than the reviews suggest they should, and I am with the audience.
Verdict
This is a film that knows exactly what it is and commits to it. The plot is the least of it, but the two leads are so good together, and the world so richly grubby, that I did not much care. It is funny, it looks and sounds terrific, and it solves the oldest problem in adapting Holmes by giving you a reason to watch him think. I would rewatch it tomorrow, mostly for Downey and Law sniping at each other across that filthy Baker Street. Not the definitive Holmes, but easily the most fun one in years. 8⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas from Boxing Day. Worth catching on a big screen for the London of it.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: the chemistry paid off in a sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011), which sent Holmes and Watson across Europe against Moriarty and leaned even harder into the action. It is a bigger, noisier film that some prefer and others think loses the grimy charm of the first; I land on the original being the tighter watch. The pair has settled into its reputation as the entertaining, divisive reinvention that proved there was life in Holmes on the big screen beyond reverent costume drama. Both films are widely available on disc and digital and rotate through the streaming services.
BBFC content advice
Rated 12A by the BBFC for moderate violence. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Summary: SHERLOCK HOLMES is an action adventure story about a famous British detective and his sidekick solving a complicated case in which an aristocrat has apparently come back from the dead to wreak havoc in 19th century London. It was passed 12A for moderate violence.
Violence: There are several scenes of moderate violence in the film. These include some sequences early on in which Sherlock Holmes demonstrates his quick thinking to the viewer by describing how he is going to disable his opponents and then executing a series of precision moves such as targeted punches and ear claps. He does this when attempting to stop a murder taking place and in a bareknuckle boxing ring when the other fighter refuses to accept Holmes leaving the match. Though they have some impact, we see punches land in slow motion for example, the emphasis is on Holmes super-human quick thinking rather than a relish in inflicting pain and injury. Elsewhere there are some moments of action violence, including brief fights, sight of characters in danger and impressive explosions. At 12A the BBFC Guidelines state that moderate violence is allowed but should not dwell on detail. There should be no emphasis on injuries or blood, but occasional gory moments may be permitted if justified by the context. Within the context of this fantastical, historical action movie the violence could be contained.
Horror: SHERLOCK HOLMES also includes some mild to moderate horror images, including a corpse in a coffin and a man being boiled in his own bath, which are quite grim but contain no strong detail or periods of sustained terror, and sight of Holmes hanging with a noose round his neck as he shows Watson how a man faked his own death. There is no glamorisation of dangerous behaviour that young children are likely to copy, and it is made clear that hanging is not a game and something which could be fatal. There is also a scene where Holmes is drugged and then left tied up in a hotel room naked.
Language: The work also includes some very mild language such damn and God which could be contained at U and sight of Holmes smoking an old fashioned pipe which is not glamorous and reflects the period in which the work is set.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk), cinema classification dated 02/12/2009. Content Advice quoted from the BBFC’s ratings info for this release.
