The new Sherlock Holmes movie

The new Sherlock Holmes movie, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law as Holmes and Watson, is barely a Sherlock Holmes movie at all.  Instead, they have put together an action-adventure flick with lots of fighting, explosions, chases, and so forth, and stuck it into a simulacrum of Victorian London. 

Downey and Law are given the occasional opportunity to slip into the delightful Holmes & Watson repartee that make the old stories so enjoyable, but most of the time they are running about, falling down, jumping up, and generally fulfilling the requirements of a late-20th-century, early-21st-century action film. 

I found the plotting odd and confusing, the pacing uneven...  With a really good film, my attention will be captured early and maintained throughout.  With a poor one, like this one, I find my mind wandering, losing the thread of the story, occasionally feeling puzzled, and generally not feeling engaged in what is happening on the screen, rather disconnected. 

So I'm not happy with this film.  I think the cast does what they were asked to do.  I blame the screenwriters and director for producing something quite ordinary when they had the cast ingredients to make something extraordinary, because Downey and Law are really good actors, not just action-adventure figures, and are capable of so much more than this.

Comments

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It's one of the more fun, big-budgeted, big-studio films to come around of late.