Movie Reviews

Directed by Guy Ritchie. Starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law. Rated PG.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s most durable creation has had many incarnations, with the mould cast most strongly by Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett. Other pretenders have come and gone with less notice, so I suppose (insert grudging sigh here) enough time has passed to allow for, shall we say, a reimagination of the franchise.

Here’s where Guy Ritchie steps in. By casting a buffed-up and impenetrably accented Robert Downey Jr. as the Great Deducer, the action director (working with a committee of screenwriters) has already moved things from the effete to the hyperphysical. And Ritchie’s attempt to build a no-shit Sherlock proves energetic enough to overcome squeamishness at the notion of a Baker Street detective who lets off steam by participating in what appears to be the Piccadilly Fight Club.

Then there’s Jude Law as the enabling Dr. Watson. Usually, this is an older bumbler whose general thickness invites Holmes to condescend in his explanations. By placing this duo on the same plane of wit and masculinity, Ritchie adds an air of homoerotic tension that may be more than the Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels crowd is looking for. In any case, the occasional female interventions—from Kelly Reilly, as Watson’s fiancée, and Rachel McAdams, miscast as a master criminal after Holmes’s heart—barely register amid the bickering and bad-guy beat-downs.

Speaking of villains, The Young Victoria ’s snaggletoothed Mark Strong plays a Satan-worshipping aristocrat whose black-magic tricks and proto-fascistic regalia threaten the whole empire. Not that the filthy squalor of (The Old) Victorian London, cleverly depicted here with much computer assistance, looks worth saving. Still, it gives Holmes something to do between puffs of whatever he’s smoking.