If George Clooney reminds people of the way Cary Grant looked in pictures (calm, still, handsome, composed, perfectly tailored), then Robert Downey Jr. reminds me of the way Cary Grant actually behaved in his movies — charismatically self-amused, playful, willing to look a little goofy, mentally two steps ahead of everyone else onscreen, and above all, physical. It’s impossible to imagine George Clooney doing handsprings down the hall the way Grant did in Holiday, but Robert Downey Jr. seems to be on the verge of cutting loose with some gymnastics practically every moment he’s onscreen these days. Just look at him as the title character in Sherlock Holmes, in which he is constantly diving out of high windows or stripping to the waist for a bare-knuckle boxing match. In one scene, he gets handcuffed naked to a bed, and when the chambermaid enters, he’s as unflappable as Grant would have been had he ever found himself in a similar situation. (Think of Grant entering that woman’s bedroom through the window in North by Northwest.)As Sherlock Holmes, Downey faces the same dilemma Cary Grant did in His Girl Friday and Gunga Din: he’s an adrenaline addict who can’t believe his lifelong sidekick — in this case Dr. Watson (Jude Law) — wants to leave him in order to settle down and get married. And he deals with the problem in the same way: by dragging Watson into his latest adventure and hopefully reminding him of all the fun and excitement he’d be giving up. Not to mention all the explosions and fights and rooftop chases — director Guy Ritchie has reconceived Arthur Conan Doyle’s iconic detective as a brawling action hero, albeit one who frequently pauses during his fights to calculate the ideal way to incapacitate his opponent with maximum efficiency.
Purists may howl — Downey’s performance is certainly a far cry from the cool, cerebral, “definitive” version of Holmes that Jeremy Brett gave for the BBC — but I don’t mind seeing a classic character get reinvented, even radically, provided the reinvention holds together. And Sherlock Holmes feels like all of a piece, from its comic-book visualization of Victorian England to the just-slightly-larger-than-life villains and henchmen Holmes and Watson must battle. Downey effortlessly convinces you both of Holmes’ nimble mind and his physical prowess, while Jude Law is the rare Watson who’s allowed to be as charismatic as Holmes — a John Steed who's as pretty as Emma Peel. There’s a fight scene in a shipyard midway through the movie that’s too spectacularly destructive for its own good, but otherwise, I thought this movie was a whole lot of good, pulpy fun in the vein of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or The Mask of Zorro or the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, and I can only attribute critics’ reluctance to praise it to a residual dislike and distrust of Guy Ritchie.
That dislike and distrust are well-deserved, of course — this is a director, after all, whose previous three pictures were Swept Away, Revolver, and RocknRolla — and Ritchie does overindulge in that slow-motion/sped-up-motion thing that’s become one of the more annoying tics of recent action pictures, but he keeps the pace brisk, the banter amusing, the plot points clear, the scenery colourful, and the mystery entertaining. He casts Rachel McAdams as Irene Adler, and while she’s not all she could be in the role, she looks as good walking down the street with her lilac bustle poking out from her dark coat as she does wearing a masculine-looking vest and trousers, fighting for her life atop the half-built London Bridge.
Try as I might, I just don’t see what a critic like Jeffrey Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere is seeing when he calls Sherlock Holmes “a corporate disease movie... not Wild Wild West, but a similar kind of travesty.” You want a travesty? Look at the trailer for Tim Burton’s upcoming version of Alice in Wonderland. As for Sherlock Holmes, I had a good time at it, although in order to do so, I wonder if I had to do something that Holmes himself never would, and turn off the logical part of my brain.
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