Sherlock Holmes

Director: Guy Ritchie (2009)

“The chief enemy of creativity is good taste.” famously said Pablo Picasso. However bad taste does not necessarily makes good movies. I watched the movie just because of Guy Ritchie, because I remember his movies to be stylish and so British and certainly made with a taste. I couldn’t imagine anybody better to play with such a cultural cliché as Sherlock Holmes. However I left the movie truly disappointed.

The plot in my opinion is truly disastrous. Even if it is the only hole in this otherwise well crafted film, that hole is so big, that I just couldn’t really appreciate the rest. I mean I enjoyed the actors, I enjoyed the way how the image of Sherlock was created, the accents on his physique, on his egomania, on his weird experiments with substances and his psychopathic lifestyle of a genius in general. I enjoyed the way how London was shown. It is visually very good movie, and it was quiet atmospheric sometimes, but just when it comes to the action scenes it becomes so boring and stupid, that I inevitably felt myself cheated.

The scene in the shipyard, the one with pigs and the big saw, the final scene on the scaffolds of Tower bridge, the big Russian guy. C’mon we’ve seen this hundreds and hundreds of times in all sorts of good and bad action movies. I’m just not six years old anymore, I’ve seen hundreds of movies in my lifetime and when I go to cinema I want at least a hint of originality. Also the whole idea of including masons (neither good nor bad by itself) but we’ve seen plenty of movies involving masons that are set in 19 century London and I think if you use them, you have to find some sort of original twist to the theme. Making them plotting some sort of apocalypse a la James Bond... Why? It’s just dumb. Cliché + cliché + cliché very rarely makes anything original. But that’s the way how Hollywood mainstream cinema goes. That’s how they are earning those huge sums of money. Apparently.

I found one interesting thing to think about. How the image of Sherlock Holmes undergoes some sort of evolution in our age of superheros. In this movie he is in a way catching up at least with Indiana Jones. I wonder why that didn’t happen earlier. Maybe because of the English conservativeness. Though to be honest I’m not sure if it’s interesting and relevant enough.

So I don’t think that Guy Ritchie ever was an artist of Picasso’s caliber so maybe he better had to stick with the taste.