Culture Blues

by Wes Cheng

One of the Sherlock Holmes stories I remember reading the most growing up is "The Red-Headed League." In it, Holmes deduces in under five minutes that thieves are tunneling under a bank in order to rob it.

How did he come to such a conclusion? He tapped the pavement in front of the bank and noticed the ground was hollow and that the antagonist had dirty trousers.

Such was the spirit and ingenuity of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's original writings. The logical conclusions based on simple observations are largely what have provided Holmes with his lasting power over the past 100 years.

Much of that is lost in Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes, starring Robert Downey, Jr. as Holmes and Jude Law as Dr. Watson.

In this movie, Holmes and Watson are charged with apprehending serial killer Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong) before he can murder a sixth person. Apparently, Blackwood was part of some sort of cult with strange magical rituals. Ultimately, Blackwood's goal is to destroy Parliament and take over England and, eventually, the world.

To be sure, there are elements of the original Holmes' powers of deduction throughout. When Holmes meets Watson's fiancé, Mary Morstan, he quickly sizes her up and deduces that she was once engaged to another man. In one of the many action sequences throughout the film, Holmes plays out how to quickly defeat an opponent by observing weaknesses throughout his body.

But for the most part, the spirit of the original stories is nowhere to be found.

In investigating Blackwood, Holmes runs across a lab inhabited by one of his henchmen and analyzes a crime scene with one of the murder victims. At the conclusion of the story, the viewer is given an explanation of how these correlate with each other, but the explanation is such that a second (or even third) viewing of the visual clues still wouldn't mean anything to the viewer without the help at the end.

Put simply - the clues aren't intuitive and don't give the sort of "Ah ha!" moments that Sir Conan Doyle provided in his writings. And that is the chief shortcoming of the movie. Without the logical deductions of the original stories, it ends up just being a run of the mill action movie with a weak plot, and the action is fairly commonplace compared to similar blockbuster films (namely, Avatar). This winter, there are many better options in the theaters.