Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes wants to be two films at once. One is a grimy period mystery about a consulting detective chasing a man who claims to have beaten death. The other is a bare-knuckle action picture in which that detective strips to the waist and trades punches in a basement ring. The 2009 film, written by Michael Robert Johnson, Simon Kinberg and Anthony Peckham, never decides which one it is. That indecision costs it.
Trailer, via Warner Bros..
Robert Downey Jr. and the Gaunt Holmes
Robert Downey Jr. plays Sherlock Holmes as a bohemian scientist and detective-for-hire, a man who becomes a wanted fugitive while hunting Lord Blackwood. Downey came to the project through Joel Silver’s offices, where he learned about it while visiting with his wife, producer Susan Downey. Ritchie first thought Downey was too old, wanting a younger Holmes on a learning curve in the mold of Batman Begins. He cast him anyway.
Downey told the BBC what drew him in: “I think me and Guy are well-suited to working together. The more I look into the books, the more fantastic it becomes. Holmes is such a weirdo.” He also relayed his wife’s read on the part — that the description of a quirky, half-nuts character “could be a description of me.”
That self-awareness is the performance’s best asset and its limit. Downey’s Holmes is eccentric, sharp and physically restless, and he lost weight for the role after Chris Martin told him Holmes should look “gaunt” and “skinny.” Ritchie has called his English accent “flawless.” It is not flawless, but it holds.
Jude Law’s Watson Is the Real Find
Jude Law plays Dr. John Watson, Holmes’s companion, a surgeon and a veteran of the Second Afghan War. This is the film’s smartest piece of casting. Law’s Watson is a colleague rather than the bumbling fool Nigel Bruce popularized in the 1930s and 1940s films, and the script gives him competence, a temper and a life outside Baker Street.
Watson is engaged to Mary Morstan, played by Kelly Reilly, and is moving out of 221B Baker Street. He is ending the partnership because he is exhausted by Holmes’s eccentricities. That break — two men who work well together and one of them finally having had enough — is more interesting than anything the villain plot offers, and the film knows it for about twenty minutes.
A Dead Man and Three More Deaths
The plot, set in 1890 London, opens with Holmes and Watson stopping the ritualistic murder of a woman by Lord Henry Blackwood. Blackwood, played by Mark Strong, is a noble who has killed five women before and claims supernatural powers. Inspector Lestrade, played by Eddie Marsan, and the police arrest Blackwood. He is later hanged for his crimes and pronounced dead by Watson.
Two months after the arrest, Blackwood summons Holmes before his hanging and warns that three more deaths will follow and that Holmes cannot prevent them. Then his tomb is found broken into, and the corpse of a missing man named Luke Reordan is inside the coffin.
Rachel McAdams plays Irene Adler, Holmes’s former adversary, who asks him to find Reordan. Holmes follows her and deduces she is working for a man he identifies as a professor, and that the man intimidates her. That professor is the presence of Moriarty, and the film treats him as a shadow rather than a character.
Holmes and Watson follow clues from the body to Reordan’s lab, where they find experiments attempting to merge science with magic. Holmes is then abducted and brought to the Temple of the Four Orders, a secret magical fraternity. Its head, Lord Chief Justice Sir Thomas Rotheram, played by James Fox, introduces Holmes to U.S. Ambassador Standish and Home Secretary Lord Coward, played by Hans Matheson. They ask Holmes to stop Blackwood, a former member of the society and Rotheram’s secret illegitimate son.
That night, Rotheram drowns in his bath as Blackwood watches. Coward calls a meeting of the Order and nominates Blackwood to lead it. Blackwood reveals himself and lays out a plan to seize control of the British Empire and reconquer the United States. Standish tries to shoot him and bursts into flames when he fires.
What the Numbers Say
- Runtime: 129 minutes
- Release: wide, by Warner Bros. Pictures, 25–26 December 2009
- Worldwide gross: $525 million
- 2009 rank: eighth-highest-grossing film of the year
- Metacritic: 57/100
- Awards: Downey won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy; two Academy Award nominations, Best Original Score and Best Art Direction
- Sequel: Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, 2011
Where the Film Ranks Against Itself
Ranked by what actually works, the pieces of Sherlock Holmes fall in this order:
- Law’s Watson, a genuine revision of a character the movies had worn down to a joke.
- The Holmes-Watson breakup, the only emotional engine the film bothers to build.
- Mark Strong’s Blackwood, a serviceable menace whose supernatural claims the film never has to resolve.
- The Temple of the Four Orders conspiracy, which arrives late and explains too much.
- The action set pieces, which are competently staged and entirely weightless.
- The Moriarty thread, an advertisement for a sequel that had not been greenlit.
Ritchie’s Style Has Nowhere to Go
Ritchie brings the same propulsive editing and physical comedy he used in his earlier crime films. Both he and Downey are martial arts enthusiasts, and the fighting draws on the Baritsu mentioned in the 1901 story The Adventure of the Empty House. That is a real detail from Conan Doyle, and the film treats it as one more piece of texture.
The problem is that Ritchie’s style is a machine for momentum, and this story needs dread. A mysticist who appears to rise from the dead should make a viewer uneasy. Instead the film keeps cutting away to another punch, another quip, another slow-motion explosion of glass. The mystery is solved by Holmes narrating his deductions in advance, which is faithful to the character and fatal to suspense.
The 129-minute runtime is not the issue. The issue is that the film spends its first act on a partnership ending and its second act on a conspiracy that has nothing to do with that partnership.
What the Film Earns and What It Doesn’t
Sherlock Holmes grossed $525 million worldwide and finished 2009 as the eighth-highest-grossing film of the year, which tells you the audience showed up. Downey took the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy, and the film picked up two Academy Award nominations for Best Original Score and Best Art Direction. Those nominations are the honest summary of the movie: it looks and sounds better than it thinks.
The sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, arrived in 2011, and the Moriarty tease here was clearly built to feed it. What the 2009 film never earns is the sense that Holmes has met something he cannot outthink. Blackwood is a puzzle with a body count, and the film’s own plot resolves him with chemistry, not character.
Downey and Law are worth the ticket. The mystery around them is not. This is a franchise launch wearing a detective story as a coat, and the coat does not fit.
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