Sherlock Holmes

Stop friends from telling you much of anything about Hollywood’s umpteenth screen version of Sherlock Holmes. In fact, quit reading this review right now.

Okay, well, since you persist, let’s just keep the mystery a mystery—except to say that the movie, directed by Guy Ritchie, serves up wit, mood, quirky energy, lots of action, stunning production design, a great music score and terrifically entertaining performances by Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law as, respectively, troubled supersleuth Holmes and wily, straight-arrow Watson. Throw in Mark Strong as a villainous, magnetic British lord feared for his mighty Satanic powers and out to create havoc for Holmes (and the entire world) and you have the ingredients for a rip-roaring good time at the movies.

In a role for which he doesn’t automatically spring to mind, Downey is all quirk and mumbles—closer to Jack Sparrow-meets-Tyler Durden than the icy, impeccable, fiendishly clever, tweedy previous Holmeses played definitively in a series of 1940s films by Basil Rathbone and, three decades later, on TV by Jeremy Brett. Odds are that Downey will fully inhabit the role in further Holmes adventures, and Law is already right in the pocket, quietly and unobtrusively commanding in every scene he is in. Rachel McAdams, playing Holmes’s former flame and rival, has an ill-defined role and looks too contemporary, and we find ourselves wanting more screen time from Strong. But, good as some of the actors are, they’re outdone by Ritchie’s driving, idiosyncratic direction that makes a big, expensive franchise movie not feel cookie-cutter. Sherlock Holmes is the surprise gift of the season.