Sherlock Holmes (2009)

Sherlock Holmes is everything you would expect from a suspense action movie, and that is what's exactly is wrong with it. Sherlock Holmes, brilliant and eccentric detective get reduced to an action superhero ready to pounce on just about anyone, and Dr. Watson as the ever ready sidekick. While this can be amusing, the movie feels more like a decent attempt at fan fiction, rather than an accurate, or even respectable portrayal of the icon.

Even the relationship of Holmes and Watson falls flat, striving for a bromance angle rather than the conflicted connection between two conflicted grownup men. That Watson once referred to Holmes as "positively inhuman at times" that Holmes sheds irritation over Watson's inaccurate, and more emotional portrayals of his adventures, that Watson can only describe Holmes concern for him through his facial expressions and almost never in words, that the two still stick it out despite their professional differences, gets lost somehow in the numerous and senseless fistfights.

All characters are boxed in, trapped in 21st century stereotypes. Robert Downey Jr. is ever the brilliant actor, but he feels like he still has the hangover from his days as Tony Stark, ready to quip wisecracks. Watson who provides the lens where we are to see House, merely plays the willing accomplice, amusing yet somehow hollow, a kind of Wilson to Dr. Gregory House. Even Irene Adler is reduced to the cliché of temptress, ready to "succumb to Holmes' emotions", as Moriarty says. Their relationship is far more complicated, and goes beyond Ritchie's vision of Holmes giving Adler a kiss on the cheek before leaving her.

In this action packed movie, Ritchie seems to have missed the whole point. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's genius was because he understood that the turmoil didn't lie in the mysteries that Holmes had to solve, but rather in his mind. His was a mind always ready to find order, ready to find the missing parts, once likened to a storage room where one had to move the pieces to their proper places. Which is also why Holmes could never quite be with a woman: it was simply not logical, it existed beyond the rules that governed him. And which was why he was quite fascinated with Adler, she was a puzzle he couldn't solve. He was to her, the woman, idealized, yet existing beyond the realms of human love.

The plot is dismissible, and reaches the point of ridiculousness when Holmes starts drawing a star on the floorboard to simulate a magic ritual. There is some promise in the production, Baker St. with its people, and its culture, feel alive. But that is such a small consolation for a movie that could have given much more.