It's become a central truth of American filmmaking that audiences will watch Robert Downey Jr. doing pretty much anything, and when he's having as much fun as he is as the magnetic center of Sherlock Holmes, there's no choice but to be swept along for the ride. Effectively remaking the original Pirates of the Caribbean as a Victorian London caper, Guy Ritchie combines his kinetic direction with the limitless charms of Downey Jr and Jude Law to come up with terrific entertainment that's equal parts brains and brawn, American recklessness and English manners. In short, it's a blast.
Sunday, 30 December 2012
Friday, 28 December 2012
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Thursday, 27 December 2012
Sherlock holmes movie cast and crew
Directed by
Guy Ritchie
Robert Downey Jr.
Jude Law
Rachel McAdams
Mark Strong
Eddie Marsan
Robert Maillet
Geraldine James
Kelly Reilly
William Houston
Hans Matheson
James Fox
William Hope
Clive Russell
Guy Ritchie
Robert Downey Jr.
Jude Law
Rachel McAdams
Mark Strong
Eddie Marsan
Robert Maillet
Geraldine James
Kelly Reilly
William Houston
Hans Matheson
James Fox
William Hope
Clive Russell
Sherlock holmes movie overview
A crippled veteran, returning to London from Afghanistan and forced to live on a small pension, finds a flatmate who turns out to be a drug addict. They become close friends and this other man eventually tells the ex-soldier that Britain is heading for disaster but will emerge "a cleaner, better, stronger land" and suggests they rush to the bank to cash a cheque before its signatory reneges. The subject of this highly topical story is, as you've probably guessed, Dr John H Watson, narrator of the Sherlock Holmes stories. He's well played by Jude Law in Guy Ritchie's second Holmes movie as a sensible, intelligent, reliable chap, even if he too readily explodes or expostulates when confronted by his flatmate's outrageous behaviour.
But while the film's art director and costume designer give us an attractive version of late Victorian society, Robert Downey Jr's Holmes is from the end of the next century. His stubble is not even of the designer kind, his dress what passes now as "smart casual". The introspective, contemplative, ratiocinative, philosophic aspect of Holmes gets obscured as Ritchie turns him into a 21st-century man of action in the mould of Indiana Jones and Daniel Craig's ultra-tough James Bond. We know that Holmes practised the martial art known as baritsu, but Downey has the fighting skills of an SAS trooper, the agility of a trapeze artist, the stamina of a long-distance runner and the physique of a man with a personal trainer. Like Bond, he endures pain and torture as he's beaten by thugs, injected by deadly poisons and suspended by a meat hook stuck into his chest.
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The background mood is right, a complacent, seemingly optimistic 1890s bustling with energy, but with something dangerous rumbling underneath that is more than the tube station being built near 221B Baker Street. A vast conspiracy is being launched by the great mathematician Professor Moriarty, but only Holmes can do the maths necessary to realise that all the bombings and assassinations around Europe are part of the Napoleon of crime's plan to foment war between France and Germany. The aim apparently is to make the professor rich through his recently established control of armament factories that will eventually fulfil his megalomaniac ambitions. But while the intrigue is persuasive and related to many of the concerns of fin-de-siècle politics and the melodramatic literature of the period, the nonstop action is very much of our current cinema. The movie begins with a vast explosion in Strasbourg followed by similar pyrotechnics in London, Paris and Germany, which punctuate endless chases, fights on trains and battles that result in a body count that anticipates the world war Holmes seeks to avert.
But while the film's art director and costume designer give us an attractive version of late Victorian society, Robert Downey Jr's Holmes is from the end of the next century. His stubble is not even of the designer kind, his dress what passes now as "smart casual". The introspective, contemplative, ratiocinative, philosophic aspect of Holmes gets obscured as Ritchie turns him into a 21st-century man of action in the mould of Indiana Jones and Daniel Craig's ultra-tough James Bond. We know that Holmes practised the martial art known as baritsu, but Downey has the fighting skills of an SAS trooper, the agility of a trapeze artist, the stamina of a long-distance runner and the physique of a man with a personal trainer. Like Bond, he endures pain and torture as he's beaten by thugs, injected by deadly poisons and suspended by a meat hook stuck into his chest.
.jpg)
The background mood is right, a complacent, seemingly optimistic 1890s bustling with energy, but with something dangerous rumbling underneath that is more than the tube station being built near 221B Baker Street. A vast conspiracy is being launched by the great mathematician Professor Moriarty, but only Holmes can do the maths necessary to realise that all the bombings and assassinations around Europe are part of the Napoleon of crime's plan to foment war between France and Germany. The aim apparently is to make the professor rich through his recently established control of armament factories that will eventually fulfil his megalomaniac ambitions. But while the intrigue is persuasive and related to many of the concerns of fin-de-siècle politics and the melodramatic literature of the period, the nonstop action is very much of our current cinema. The movie begins with a vast explosion in Strasbourg followed by similar pyrotechnics in London, Paris and Germany, which punctuate endless chases, fights on trains and battles that result in a body count that anticipates the world war Holmes seeks to avert.
The frenzy is actually increased by the device of sudden flashbacks using high-speed editing to explain how the great detective-chessmaster had anticipated, then executed, a succession of clever moves that resulted in the violent triumph we've just witnessed. There is not, however, too much time in this high-octane narrative for the development of character. Naturally, the women don't get their due. Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams), the love of Holmes's life, appears fleetingly. In a major comic coup that makes the audience draw its breath and laugh heartlessly, Holmes throws Watson's wife from a train as it crosses a viaduct at night. Noomi Rapace, the striking heroine from The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, stalks mysteriously through the picture as a fortune teller as if she'd been told to think she's appearing in the gypsy encampment sequence in From Russia With Love. The three Ms – Moriarty, Moran and Mycroft – come out rather better.
The screenwriters, Michele and Kieran Mulroney, have drawn on Conan Doyle's novel The Valley of Fear for Moriarty's character and background, and on the story "The Final Problem" for the film's climactic encounter between Moriarty and Holmes at an anachronistically named "summit conference" beside the Reichenbach Falls. And Jared Harris plays him as a ratty or foxy type, rather different from the gaunt senior undertaker depicted by Sidney Paget in The Strand Magazine. The ex-army marksman turned assassin Colonel Sebastian Moran is a forceful presence as played by Paul Anderson. Stephen Fry has the right portly build and detached manner for Holmes's older brother, the establishment fixer Mycroft (a part in which Christopher Lee was wholly miscast in Billy Wilder's Holmes movie). He is, however, embarrassing when conducting a breakfast-time conversation with Watson's wife while naked, and he introduces an unnecessarily camp element by addressing Holmes as "Sherly", presumably a reference to the famous "and stop calling me Shirley" joke in Airplane!. Hans Zimmer's melodramatic score incorporates arias from Mozart's Don Giovanni and a jaunty Morricone theme from Two Mules for Sister Sara.
Watching this movie, I was constantly thinking of my friend and colleague, the brilliant wit, critic, novelist, translator and pasticheur Gilbert Adair, who died 10 days ago. Especially his postmodern trilogy of parodic detective stories which conclude at a Sherlock Holmes conference in Meiringen, where Adair himself plunges into the Reichenbach Falls with his own central character. Adair calls non-canonical Watson narratives "Schlock Holmes", but the final book in his series, And Then There Was No One, contains the best Holmes pastiche ever written, a 30-page re-creation of The Giant Rat of Sumatra, a tale referred to by Watson in "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire" and called "a story for which the world is not yet prepared". I must declare a slight personal interest here, as there's a pretentious movie critic in the book called Philippe Françaix.
But while the film's art director and costume designer give us an attractive version of late Victorian society, Robert Downey Jr's Holmes is from the end of the next century. His stubble is not even of the designer kind, his dress what passes now as "smart casual". The introspective, contemplative, ratiocinative, philosophic aspect of Holmes gets obscured as Ritchie turns him into a 21st-century man of action in the mould of Indiana Jones and Daniel Craig's ultra-tough James Bond. We know that Holmes practised the martial art known as baritsu, but Downey has the fighting skills of an SAS trooper, the agility of a trapeze artist, the stamina of a long-distance runner and the physique of a man with a personal trainer. Like Bond, he endures pain and torture as he's beaten by thugs, injected by deadly poisons and suspended by a meat hook stuck into his chest.
.jpg)
The background mood is right, a complacent, seemingly optimistic 1890s bustling with energy, but with something dangerous rumbling underneath that is more than the tube station being built near 221B Baker Street. A vast conspiracy is being launched by the great mathematician Professor Moriarty, but only Holmes can do the maths necessary to realise that all the bombings and assassinations around Europe are part of the Napoleon of crime's plan to foment war between France and Germany. The aim apparently is to make the professor rich through his recently established control of armament factories that will eventually fulfil his megalomaniac ambitions. But while the intrigue is persuasive and related to many of the concerns of fin-de-siècle politics and the melodramatic literature of the period, the nonstop action is very much of our current cinema. The movie begins with a vast explosion in Strasbourg followed by similar pyrotechnics in London, Paris and Germany, which punctuate endless chases, fights on trains and battles that result in a body count that anticipates the world war Holmes seeks to avert.
But while the film's art director and costume designer give us an attractive version of late Victorian society, Robert Downey Jr's Holmes is from the end of the next century. His stubble is not even of the designer kind, his dress what passes now as "smart casual". The introspective, contemplative, ratiocinative, philosophic aspect of Holmes gets obscured as Ritchie turns him into a 21st-century man of action in the mould of Indiana Jones and Daniel Craig's ultra-tough James Bond. We know that Holmes practised the martial art known as baritsu, but Downey has the fighting skills of an SAS trooper, the agility of a trapeze artist, the stamina of a long-distance runner and the physique of a man with a personal trainer. Like Bond, he endures pain and torture as he's beaten by thugs, injected by deadly poisons and suspended by a meat hook stuck into his chest.
.jpg)
The background mood is right, a complacent, seemingly optimistic 1890s bustling with energy, but with something dangerous rumbling underneath that is more than the tube station being built near 221B Baker Street. A vast conspiracy is being launched by the great mathematician Professor Moriarty, but only Holmes can do the maths necessary to realise that all the bombings and assassinations around Europe are part of the Napoleon of crime's plan to foment war between France and Germany. The aim apparently is to make the professor rich through his recently established control of armament factories that will eventually fulfil his megalomaniac ambitions. But while the intrigue is persuasive and related to many of the concerns of fin-de-siècle politics and the melodramatic literature of the period, the nonstop action is very much of our current cinema. The movie begins with a vast explosion in Strasbourg followed by similar pyrotechnics in London, Paris and Germany, which punctuate endless chases, fights on trains and battles that result in a body count that anticipates the world war Holmes seeks to avert.
The frenzy is actually increased by the device of sudden flashbacks using high-speed editing to explain how the great detective-chessmaster had anticipated, then executed, a succession of clever moves that resulted in the violent triumph we've just witnessed. There is not, however, too much time in this high-octane narrative for the development of character. Naturally, the women don't get their due. Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams), the love of Holmes's life, appears fleetingly. In a major comic coup that makes the audience draw its breath and laugh heartlessly, Holmes throws Watson's wife from a train as it crosses a viaduct at night. Noomi Rapace, the striking heroine from The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, stalks mysteriously through the picture as a fortune teller as if she'd been told to think she's appearing in the gypsy encampment sequence in From Russia With Love. The three Ms – Moriarty, Moran and Mycroft – come out rather better.
The screenwriters, Michele and Kieran Mulroney, have drawn on Conan Doyle's novel The Valley of Fear for Moriarty's character and background, and on the story "The Final Problem" for the film's climactic encounter between Moriarty and Holmes at an anachronistically named "summit conference" beside the Reichenbach Falls. And Jared Harris plays him as a ratty or foxy type, rather different from the gaunt senior undertaker depicted by Sidney Paget in The Strand Magazine. The ex-army marksman turned assassin Colonel Sebastian Moran is a forceful presence as played by Paul Anderson. Stephen Fry has the right portly build and detached manner for Holmes's older brother, the establishment fixer Mycroft (a part in which Christopher Lee was wholly miscast in Billy Wilder's Holmes movie). He is, however, embarrassing when conducting a breakfast-time conversation with Watson's wife while naked, and he introduces an unnecessarily camp element by addressing Holmes as "Sherly", presumably a reference to the famous "and stop calling me Shirley" joke in Airplane!. Hans Zimmer's melodramatic score incorporates arias from Mozart's Don Giovanni and a jaunty Morricone theme from Two Mules for Sister Sara.
Watching this movie, I was constantly thinking of my friend and colleague, the brilliant wit, critic, novelist, translator and pasticheur Gilbert Adair, who died 10 days ago. Especially his postmodern trilogy of parodic detective stories which conclude at a Sherlock Holmes conference in Meiringen, where Adair himself plunges into the Reichenbach Falls with his own central character. Adair calls non-canonical Watson narratives "Schlock Holmes", but the final book in his series, And Then There Was No One, contains the best Holmes pastiche ever written, a 30-page re-creation of The Giant Rat of Sumatra, a tale referred to by Watson in "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire" and called "a story for which the world is not yet prepared". I must declare a slight personal interest here, as there's a pretentious movie critic in the book called Philippe Françaix.
Sherlock holmes movie review
It's become a central truth of American filmmaking that audiences will watch Robert Downey Jr. doing pretty much anything, and when he's having as much fun as he is as the magnetic center of Sherlock Holmes, there's no choice but to be swept along for the ride. Effectively remaking the original Pirates of the Caribbean as a Victorian London caper, Guy Ritchie combines his kinetic direction with the limitless charms of Downey Jr and Jude Law to come up with terrific entertainment that's equal parts brains and brawn, American recklessness and English manners. In short, it's a blast.
The movie is structured essentially as an adventure romance, as Holmes (Downey Jr.) and Watson (Law) try to break up and, through crooked schemes and explosions and near escapes, realize by the end how much they mean to one another after all. At the beginning Watson is preparing to move out of 221b Baker Street, with plans to propose to pretty and proper Mary (Kelly Reilly) and leave the detective business entirely. Holmes, bored and hilariously jealous, attempts to sabotage Watson's engagement and also draw him back into the game, now that an old closed case has suddenly reopened.
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Months earlier Watson and Holmes put away Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong), an aristocrat who murdered five people via some kind of dark arts ceremony. Watson himself supervised Blackwood's hanging, but when he appears to have risen from the dead, everyone from the police to a secret cabal wants to know how he did it. Blackwood and his legion of followers have plans for world domination via drinking potions and other hocus pocus, while Holmes goes about finding Blackwood in the only way he knows how-- using his "not inconsiderable knowledge" and foolproof logic. Meanwhile, Holmes's old flame Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams) is back in town, a criminal beauty working secretly for a shadowy boss with a penchant for fancy weaponry. Adler pops up from time to time to help Watson and Holmes in their investigations, and it's clear to the audience that she'll throw a wrench in things even when Holmes hasn't quite gotten there.
Dipping into chemistry and pentagrams and the earliest forms of electricity, the plot is all over the place, and I'm not entirely certain I understand how it all fit together in the end. But the story really just provides a vehicle for the action and the fantastic character interactions, one of which delivers slightly better than the other. While some action setpieces, like a fight at a shipyard and the final race against the clock, are brilliantly structured, the fight choreography gets chopped up into bits, with Ritchie cutting too quickly for the audience to see a punch or a kick all the way through. The editing often works directly at odds with Downey Jr.'s physicality, as he throws in a funny movement or a particularly sweet punch, only to see it lost entirely to needless slo-mo and quick cuts.
Then again, all that Ritchie noodling works great in Holmes's investigation scenes, allowing him visual flashbacks to all the clues that led him to his conclusions and avoiding the dreadful slowness that comes with most mystery-solving monologues. Miraculously the audience is right there with Holmes even during his most out-there epiphanies, and the equally out-there camerawork pays off well in making this period piece feel unstuffy, but also not gimmicky. He's helped immensely by Hans Zimmer's loose, wily score, one of the best action movie scores I've heard in years.
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When Ritchie holds the camera relatively still and lets all of the actors play off each other, there's nothing better. Eddie Marsan is hilarious as the frustrated Inspector Lestrade, and Strong's Blackwood makes for a great intellectual equal against Holmes, but when Downey Jr. and Law are together the screen lights up so brightly it could catch fire. Bantering like Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell or trading off punches in a fight, the two actors have rarely looked so self-assured or in synch with an onscreen partner. Watson and Holmes squabble over clothes and the dog, tend one another's wounds and protect one another from injury, and generally make the best action-adventure duo since Indy and Marion. The one downside to all this energy between the boys is that Adler is sold short, flitting in and out of the plot seemingly at random, and rarely getting much out of Sherlock beyond a stolen kiss or two. McAdams is excellent and fiery in the role, but it seems much of her part was trimmed in order to make more room for Downey Jr. and Law. But oh, what a consolation prize that is.
As the movie winds down it begins to brazenly set up a sequel, and given the manifold adventures of Holmes and Watson that Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, it's hard to imagine two heroes better suited to a modern franchise. There are surely simpler Holmes stories to tell that won't get so bogged down in plot, and maybe there's a way to let the brains beat out the brawn next time, at least if the fights are going to stay so incomprehensible. But keep this iteration of Watson and Holmes together, and we're likely to follow them anywhere.
The movie is structured essentially as an adventure romance, as Holmes (Downey Jr.) and Watson (Law) try to break up and, through crooked schemes and explosions and near escapes, realize by the end how much they mean to one another after all. At the beginning Watson is preparing to move out of 221b Baker Street, with plans to propose to pretty and proper Mary (Kelly Reilly) and leave the detective business entirely. Holmes, bored and hilariously jealous, attempts to sabotage Watson's engagement and also draw him back into the game, now that an old closed case has suddenly reopened.
.jpg)
Months earlier Watson and Holmes put away Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong), an aristocrat who murdered five people via some kind of dark arts ceremony. Watson himself supervised Blackwood's hanging, but when he appears to have risen from the dead, everyone from the police to a secret cabal wants to know how he did it. Blackwood and his legion of followers have plans for world domination via drinking potions and other hocus pocus, while Holmes goes about finding Blackwood in the only way he knows how-- using his "not inconsiderable knowledge" and foolproof logic. Meanwhile, Holmes's old flame Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams) is back in town, a criminal beauty working secretly for a shadowy boss with a penchant for fancy weaponry. Adler pops up from time to time to help Watson and Holmes in their investigations, and it's clear to the audience that she'll throw a wrench in things even when Holmes hasn't quite gotten there.
Dipping into chemistry and pentagrams and the earliest forms of electricity, the plot is all over the place, and I'm not entirely certain I understand how it all fit together in the end. But the story really just provides a vehicle for the action and the fantastic character interactions, one of which delivers slightly better than the other. While some action setpieces, like a fight at a shipyard and the final race against the clock, are brilliantly structured, the fight choreography gets chopped up into bits, with Ritchie cutting too quickly for the audience to see a punch or a kick all the way through. The editing often works directly at odds with Downey Jr.'s physicality, as he throws in a funny movement or a particularly sweet punch, only to see it lost entirely to needless slo-mo and quick cuts.
Then again, all that Ritchie noodling works great in Holmes's investigation scenes, allowing him visual flashbacks to all the clues that led him to his conclusions and avoiding the dreadful slowness that comes with most mystery-solving monologues. Miraculously the audience is right there with Holmes even during his most out-there epiphanies, and the equally out-there camerawork pays off well in making this period piece feel unstuffy, but also not gimmicky. He's helped immensely by Hans Zimmer's loose, wily score, one of the best action movie scores I've heard in years.
.jpg)
When Ritchie holds the camera relatively still and lets all of the actors play off each other, there's nothing better. Eddie Marsan is hilarious as the frustrated Inspector Lestrade, and Strong's Blackwood makes for a great intellectual equal against Holmes, but when Downey Jr. and Law are together the screen lights up so brightly it could catch fire. Bantering like Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell or trading off punches in a fight, the two actors have rarely looked so self-assured or in synch with an onscreen partner. Watson and Holmes squabble over clothes and the dog, tend one another's wounds and protect one another from injury, and generally make the best action-adventure duo since Indy and Marion. The one downside to all this energy between the boys is that Adler is sold short, flitting in and out of the plot seemingly at random, and rarely getting much out of Sherlock beyond a stolen kiss or two. McAdams is excellent and fiery in the role, but it seems much of her part was trimmed in order to make more room for Downey Jr. and Law. But oh, what a consolation prize that is.
As the movie winds down it begins to brazenly set up a sequel, and given the manifold adventures of Holmes and Watson that Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, it's hard to imagine two heroes better suited to a modern franchise. There are surely simpler Holmes stories to tell that won't get so bogged down in plot, and maybe there's a way to let the brains beat out the brawn next time, at least if the fights are going to stay so incomprehensible. But keep this iteration of Watson and Holmes together, and we're likely to follow them anywhere.
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