Short Take: No longer just a sleuth, Holmes is also a hero

Director: Guy Ritchie (RocknRolla, Snatch, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels)

Screenwriters: Michael Robert Johnson (Début), Anthony Peckham (Invictus)

Cast: Robert Downey Jr. (Iron Man, Tropic Thunder), Jude Law (Cold Mountain, Closer), Rachel McAdams (The Notebook, Red Eye), Mark Strong (The Young Victoria, Stardust)

Length: 2 hrs 8 mins

Summary: The film begins with famed detective Sherlock Holmes (Downey Jr.) and his partner Dr. John Watson (Law) finishing their last case together.  They stop Lord Blackwood (Strong) just before he commits another ritualistic murder and a few days later witness him hanged for his crimes.  However, Blackwood seemingly comes back from the dead and Holmes and Watson, with some help from Holmes’s old flame Irene Adler (McAdams), try to discover Blackwood’s endgame before he kills anyone else.

Analysis: Guy Ritchie’s films typically surge with a frantic vigor and style and Sherlock Holmes is no different.  Ritchie’s style, which fit the gangsters and hit men of his previous films perfectly, would seem opposed to the cold logic of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s iconic detective.  However, he has not simply transcribed the Holmes of old, but made a grittier and more modern hero.  Ritchie makes the character his own in two ways: by exaggerating the Holmes character’s eccentricity, and by accentuating the latent homosexuality in the Holmes-Watson relationship.

Though Holmes is typically portrayed as a calm and collected logician, Ritchie has made him far more unbalanced.  By casting Downey Jr., Ritchie imbues the character with the fast-talking cockiness for which the actor is known.  The energy Downey Jr. brought to his portrayal of Tony Stark in Iron Man is once again present, but this time he adds a hint of eccentricity that makes Holmes seem constantly on the edge of madness.  Faced with the end of his partnership with Watson, Holmes locks himself in his room and it is only when Watson’s insists that Holmes meet his fiancé that he finally leaves.  However, while he waits for them in a restaurant, his overactive mind is barraged by the plethora of details he notices and he seems almost unable to exist in normal society.  This idea is further enhanced when, challenged by Watson’s fiancé to use powers of observation to guess her secrets, he ends by offending her.  Rather than portraying Holmes’s ability to comprehend the importance of minute details as a gift, it is seen as exactly the trait that hinders his capacity to interact with others.

The only person who seems able to tolerate Holmes is Watson.  In a surprising interpretation, Ritchie makes their interactions more akin to romantic comedies than the buddy variety.  Throughout the film, Holmes and Watson banter like Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant in His Girl Friday.  In the aforementioned scene in which Watson convinces Holmes to meet his fiancé, Watson acts as the fed-up Russell character while Downey Jr. resembles Grant’s lovable cad.  The dynamic remains throughout and their connection offers the most emotionally complex scenes in the film.  After an explosion in a factory, Holmes’s first concern is not his ex-flame Irene Adler’s well-being, but Watson’s. And later, Holmes’s guilt that Watson was injured while saving him nearly destroys his sanity.

Though Ritchie’s hyper-masculine style would seem anathema to any hints of homosexuality, his other films are not entirely devoid of the tendency.  Like his last film RocknRolla, Ritchie spends surprising amounts of time running the camera over powerful male bodies.  The tendency manifests itself most strongly in Holmes by the fact that he turns the main character into an able street fighter who first plans his attack with precision and then executes it flawlessly.  The scenes in which Holmes explains his attacks in slow motion only to have them replayed in real-time immediately after, are some of the most interesting and homoerotic sequences in the film.  The scenes suggest an admiration for the power of the male body, an admiration that is only arbitrarily expressed for the female frame.  The audience glimpses McAdams’s frame, but little time is spent admiring it.  Like the gangsters and hit men of Ritchie’s other films, Holmes is made a hero for his power, but unlike them, Holmes is both brains and brawn.

Rating: 8.0