Set in 1891, the great detective, Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.), and his faithful sidekick, Dr. John Watson (Jude Law), solve crimes across London. But when Holmes and Dr. Watson stop Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong) from completing his human sacrifice, they enter a case of smoke and mirrors posed as magic. In Guy Ritchie’s version of the classic, Holmes is a rough-and-tumble detective with the same analytic skills as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional character. The screenplay uses murder by magic to keep audiences in the same suspense that readers of Doyle’s novels experienced in the late 1800s/early 1900s, and will likely appease the appetites of Sherlock Holmes fans.
In Sherlock Holmes, the police arrest Lord Blackwood after Holmes and Dr. Watson halt the sacrifice of a young woman. During Blackwood’s execution three months later, the Lord warns Holmes that three more deaths will occur after his execution. Before the executioner secures the rope around Blackwood’s neck, his choice last words are “death is only the beginning.” Blackwood is hung and Dr. Watson pronounces the criminal dead.
While waiting for a new case, Holmes’ love interest, Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams), appears and offers Holmes money on behalf of her mysterious employer to solve the case of Reordan (Oran Gurel), a missing red-haired midget with teeth resembling fangs. Meanwhile, the Lord Blackwood case reopens when word travels that Blackwood was seen walking away from his tomb by eyewitnesses. When Holmes investigates the tomb, he discovers Reordan, dead inside the coffin. Turns out that Adler’s case is involved with Lord Blackwood’s survival and Holmes searches through the Temple of the Four Orders, a secret society that Blackwood is involved in, to solve the mystery.
Sherlock Holmes is entertaining and well-cast. In particular, Jude Law makes an excellent Dr. Watson, kind-hearted and realistic but utterly devoted to his detective friend. This film is a good old-fashioned fun movie; it is not vying for awards or relying on vulgarity and nudity for laughs, Sherlock Holmes is just simply an entertaining weekday movie. The music is extraordinarily done, using instruments popular during the late 1800s with the suspenseful soundtrack style of today to add an element of time period with modern drama. A nicely added touch was the analysis given by Holmes of what punches he planned on throwing to opponents before doing it and the breakdown of how he solved the case, a throwback to Doyle’s novels. True to form, Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes did not stray far from the original novels of the same name and was certainly, as Holmes would put it, “well done.”