Today's movie was the newest installation of Guy Richie's Sherlock Holmes saga and I am calling it a saga because the ending had epic amounts of sequal bate put into it and why not, since Richie has managed to create a fairly entertaining action film adaption of the classic detective novels. Yet again there will be spoilers.
Basically the movie revolves around Sherlock's epic war against his arch-nemesis Professor Moriarty. Moriarty naturally has a diabolical plan to acquire wealth and power at the expense of the rest of humanity and naturally Sherlock is stop Moriarty's plan. Asside for a few homages to the original stories, the plot has nothing to do with Conan Doyle's famous stories. That is not necessarily a bad thing since the mystery novels would be hard to translate into an action film. Overall the plot is fairly predictable, to the point that you can pretty much guess what is going to happen next, based on the less than subtle clues that the movie throws in your face. Plot isn't really this film's strong point and its not really trying to offer anything new, instead of settling on offering us what anyone who has seen most of the James Bond films have come to expect.
What makes this film gets right is the humorous interaction between Watson and Holmes. Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law play their roles extremely well and Downey Jr. seems to take real pleasure in dragging his sensible comrade through some pretty bizarre situations. The humorous banter between the two provide most of the entertainment in this film. Most iterations of the famous detective portray Holmes having some sort of mental illness, Jeremy Brett's Holmes was Manic-depressive, in the new series he is sociopath and Downey's seems to suffer from ADD. Law's Watson follows the traditional faithful Watson who suffers through Holmes's insane plans as a loyal friend should.
The other characters are OK, but nothing truly memorable. Moriarty is sophisticated, intelligent and ruthlessly evil. I liked the Moriarty in the new modern version of Sherlock Holmes more, who was bat shit insane. This films Moriarty went down the traditional path. Other character Richie failed badly with was Irene Adler, the only woman capable of outsmarting Holmes and the only woman he has ever been attracted to. She is dispossed of early in the film and Holmes shruggs of her apparent death without much adoo. I am generally against needless love plots, but in this case the amount of attention the relationship between the two deserved a better ending. Especially since the only motive for having her killed was plot convinience to give room for the new female lead, who's name I can't remember(as you can see this move worked brilliantly well). Adler was a part of Moriarty's organization so being torn between her love for Holmes and her obligations to Moriarty, would have offered potential plot points that were left unexploited.
The action scenes were fairly well done and were pleasent to watch. I liked Richie's style of first showing the fights in slow motion, describing Holmes's analysis of the likely outcome of the fight, before he shows it in high speed. The only scene I didn't really like was Holmes & Co escaping from Moriarty's weapons factory, where there are slow-mo shots of them being shot at by a wide variety of weapons, ranging from pistols and rifles to mortars and howitzers.
The one thing that started to bug me in this film was that it was set in 1891 and it featured a crap ton of weapons that were anachronistic. Most notable of being the Mauser C96 pistol, which wasn't produced untill 1896, a model 1895 Maxim machine gun, the Big Bertha-looking Howitzer which wasn't built untill 1914 and some type of submachine gun again not invented untill WWI. Another weapon really out of place was the Gatling Gun, a weapon that was obsolete in 1891 was being actively built at a modern weapons factory.
Another thing that really bugged me was Moriarty's grand plan, which was basically to take over a company manufacturing war materials and starting World War I to make a profit by selling supplies to all involved, basically by orchestrating basically a fictional version of the events that started the real WWI. There are few massive flaws in his plan. The greatest being that his main factory is Germany, so when Germany goes to war with France they are just going to let you ship vast quantities of war materials from Germany to France? I think not.
It isn't necessarily the most profitable plan to have a weapons and ammo factory in country that is in war, since governments in war basically tell you the price their are going to buy the materials from you, if you refuse they will just send some troops to take over the plant and let someone else run it. Also during war governments want cheap, functional weapons and equipment in bulk, with low profit margins. They are not interested expensive and complex weapon systems and even if they are, their faults are easily discovered by testing the weapon in actual combat conditions. The threat of war, that fuels an arms race, is the best time for the weapons industry, that is the period of time when governments go for the expensive fancy weapons system to get ahead in the arms race. Moriarty could make some profit, but most likely the countries involved would takeover his factories. Generally weapons industries are thightly controlled, especially in war time.
But I digress, overall the film was relatively good light action entertainment in the tradition of the James Bond films of my childhood. If you liked James Bond films by Roger Moore, then you will probably like this film.
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