Sherlock Holmes

It looked like a blasphemous interpretation of the source material.  It looked like a bad action movie toting a well known lead character to draw audiences since everyone loves watching the same recycled things over and over again.  It looked like it could perhaps be made tolerable by the awesome actors they had in the lead roles, but I didn't have my sights set very high.

It was sooo much better than it looked.

This is not to say that it was a great movie.  It was fun, things exploded in a cool fashion, the script was never awful, the actors were great, etc.  Action movie done right.  But action movies done right are still rarely "A" grade material, more like "B+".  Sherlock Holmes followed these lines.  I walked out of the theater saying it was the "best mediocre movie" I'd seen in a long time, and I stand by that.  Maybe I even upgrade that a twinge.

Going in, the biggest concern of many people I knew was that it looked like a desecration of the Holmes of Doyle's stories.  Obviously there were changes - it's hard to make a main-stream blockbuster action movie starring a little old man who's basically just really smart.  The Holmes of the screen was a snappy badass, running around and through explosions, beating people up, and thoroughly bitter inside.  He always had the comeback, he always knew where to land the punch.  There was a boxing scene in particular that seemed bad to me.  What Sherlock Holmes ever beat the hell out of people in a back-alley boxing arena?

Apparently the Holmes of Doyle's work, according to my sister.  I consider her an expert of source material faithfulness in movies since she's such a stickler on the stuff that she likes, and she knows Holmes waaay better than I do.  Holmes is a boxer in the stories.  There aren't too many explosions in the stories, but that's just a concession it was necessary to make to the silver screen.  Overall, I'm told, Robert Downy Jr.'s Holmes is very faithful in spirit to the books; much to my surprise, my sister approved.

There's a moment about a minute into the film where we're really introduced to our protagonist.  He's infiltrating some sort of basementy area and there's a guard up ahead.  We hear Holmes narrate as we see each action in slow motion:

Head tilted slightly to the left, so he's partially deaf in that ear.  That's the first point of attack.  Next paralyze the vocal chords to prevent screaming.  Probably a heavy drinker, so punch to the weak liver.  Final blow to the kneecap.  Estimated recovery time:  two weeks.

Then we back up to Holmes behind a corner, and he executes everything we've just seen in slow motion but in full speed.  It all goes according to plan.

This is exactly how I expect an action hero Holmes to act:  he uses his intellect to efficiently and effectively eliminate his enemies.  At the time I felt uncomfortable with the idea that this character I knew as an old fart sitting around a fireplace snorting cocaine and noticing miniscule details would be out and about beating the crap out of people.  I'm still not totally comfortable with it, but I'm much more accepting.  And either way, the scene was awesome.

And that beggar in front of the carriage thing?  And the boxing match?  And the smoke from the fireplace?  All equally awesome.

The music helped with this transition, I think.  It was all fiddley-Irishy music at a quick pace as Holmes didn't punch, but slapped his opponents blows out of the way.  Light hearted, jumpy, prancing about like a rabbit, this made Holmes feel like a light guy who just knew how to fight rather than a totally ripped action hero.  And not just appropriate but a beautiful score, too, and timed wonderfully.

So I've accepted that this Holmes is faithful enough to the source material to deserve my recognition.  My big pre-movie concern satisfied.  But oh is there more to say.  There's so much more.

Let's start with the plot:  the big bad evil guy (not Moriarty) aka BBEG has been murdering people in an occult fashion around London.  Holmes captures him at the beginning, and BBEG is hanged.  Soon after that, he uses his "magic spells" (it's a matter of argument whether he's really using magic or not) to rise from the grave.  He resumes killing people magically.  Holmes starts tracking the guy down, meets up with the girl, and eventually uses his cunning to track him to the big finale where Holmes saves the day.  Pretty standard.

The most interesting thing is this plot's inclusion of magic, making it reminiscent of the Cthulhu / Holmes crossover adventure game I played with Danl and Paul a while back.  I never made it all the way through that game, but it's similarity in plot is worth noting.  People seem to love combining the logic of Sherlock Holmes with the impossibilities of fantasy.  It's a paradox that's very pleasing to the mind.  Neil Gaiman wrote a story in such a universe very effectively.  This combination of two opposites is a reliable way to make an intriguing premise.  Take note, all aspiring story-tellers.

Really, though, the magic is all a lie.  This ending is taken straight from The Illusionist, which is again interesting.  Has every twist been used before, or is this one just a fun one?  The idea that you would start the Sherlock Holmes movie franchise by introducing magic is silly since you're already going to piss a lot of people off with whatever you make.  I guess it makes sense.  Sherlock Holmes is all about reason triumphing over everything else.

This presence of "magic" had a very unique effect on the feel of the setting.  It felt distinctly steampunk.  Steampunk is becoming more and more mainstream, and has been for years.  I'm glad we're seeing more of it since it's one of my favorite genres.  There were similarities to memorable books everywhere I looked.  The bureaucratic society of wizards in London of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, the weird magic stuff in the 1800s of The Anubis Gate, the CG look of the backgrounds that resembled so well The Golden Compass, the token anachronism in the form of the stun baton... I loved it all.  What was odd was how anachronistic the whole movie felt as a result.  This shouldn't come as a surprise - any modern action movie set in the 1800s is going to feel anachronistic, but it opened my eyes in a way that they hadn't before.

Many things felt very 2010 about the film - the seamless use of bullet time during fight scenes, the distortion of the whole audio track when an explosion or a gunshot went off right next to the camera.  It felt like you were actually there in a "new" way (I use quotes because I know this effect has been used before, but not as commonly as I'd like).  The whole movie is something that's all the rage right now in cinema:  take a beloved book, action it up, cast some well known names or attractive young actors, and rake in the dough.  They even added this whole magic thing to make it seem more like Harry Potter!  This is, like, the defining example of a movie from this time period.  It's so perfect.  Precisely mixing modern cinema with old familiar characters and stories.  It's beautiful.

I was reminded of Inglourious Basterds.  As with all of Tarantino's work, Basterds was as much about movies as it was about anything else.  One of the central themes was that "this is a movie - it doesn't have to act like the time and place it is set, nor does it have to pretend to.  This is a modern movie, and it is being made in 2009, and it is about 2009, and it is however the director wants it to be."  My favorite part of this was in the middle of a big gala full of powerful German leaders, titles in what looked like a hand-drawn font would pop up on the screen with arrows and point out the important people and who they were.  It's so out of place.  It's so wrong.  And it's exactly how it's supposed to be.  All at the same time.

That is how I felt watching Sherlock Holmes.  I felt like the writers / director / whoever were all keenly aware of what they were presenting.  The story was not set in the 1800s, it was set in what people in 2009 expect the 1800s to be like, with little patches of falsehood here and there to service the plot.

AND THAT'S NOT ALL!  This is all just build up for what is no doubt one of my favorite scenes in modern cinema.  Holmes has just finished a ritual he's gotten from BBEG's spellbook, and now the girl and Watson are on the scene.  Yes, it's now time for the first of Holmes's big reveals, in which he tells us everything he's discovered so far (but not what he's going to do next!).  He talks about how the murders have all been around the city in the shape of a pentagram, how each has represented a different animal that's part of the mythic Sphynx, how the next target is going to be parliament, and how we all must go now to save the day!  And what does he do?  The whole time he's giving the speech?  WHAT DOES HE DO?!

...

He uses a cane.

Bitches.

The Sherlock Holmes of 2009 is channeling House, a character DIRECTLY BASED ON SHERLOCK HOLMES.  Holy freaking shit is that meta.  That's so meta!  That's soooo meta.  It's so modern.  It's a complete anachronism.  It means the writers are consciously putting references to the modern world into their version of the 1800s.  It means they were using this other character as a basis for their character, but it's all actually just based on their original character!  It's exactly what Inglourious Basterds was telling us about.  It's so cool.

This modern feel doesn't end at House references and computer graphics.  The way the story is told is a modern way of telling a story.  There's bullet time.  There's a man hanged to death from a giant bridge by a metal chain - very hard core.  There's the presence of magic.  Everything about this movie is a 2009 thing, right down the raven that appears whenever a new death is about to be discovered.

This movie made my day.

...

Also, Rachel McAdams is pretty.