1-07-10 Movie review: Sherlock Holmes

Only one noncommercial movie for me to announce this week, but it's a real classic: Marcel Carne's Children of Paradise, written by Jaques Prevert, made in Nazi-occupied France commonly interpreted as an allegory of the Resistance in 1945, but totally enjoyable as a story of a little theatre troupe and a love story between a mime and a showgirl. Showing of Children of Paradise is 7:30 Friday in the Murdock Theatre, 536 North Broadway.

And commercially, we have what you'd be better advised not to think of as a movie about Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock Holmes is punctuated with Holmesian deductions from almost invisible clues, but despite its excellent Edwardian London flavor and a lot of standard nineteenth-century melodrama like evil potions from exotic lands and a heroine chained to a conveyor that delivers her closer and closer to the horrible saw, it's basically a Bruce Willis action movie with a whole lot of engineering structures, and invulnerable giant villain like the James Bond one with the iron teeth, and savage battles between hero and villainous forces both individual and grouped into mobs every quarter hour or so. I'm sure all the elements can be found somewhere in the original Sherlock Holmes stories, but Arthur Conan Doyle never lumped them together like this.

Though I suspect that my usual problem understanding whispered dialect was part of my problem, the Minneapolis Minnesota Star Tribune reviewer said he "didn't understand" the "morass of a plot" either, and only the wife of the man I consulted after the show could tell us. how Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes and Jude Law as Watson would up in the slaughterhouse for a key scene. There are two or three hasty explanations of Holmesian deductions, with flashback illustrations, to help you understand everything ex post facto, as is appropriate to a mystery story, so be patient and there will be efforts to clue you in. And anyway, if you reread the Conan Doyle stories, I think you'll find that such deductions are not nearly as central to Sherlock Holmes stories as you might expect. But the effect I got was of a series of individually well-made thriller action scenes with very little to string them together into a story. But they were certainly well constructed for bang-bang excitement.

Robert Downey Jr. has lived a hard life and can easily look worn enough, if not quite old enough, to be Sherlock Holmes, but Jude Law is positively pretty and hardly suggests a medical man wounded out of the foreign service; he's a standard square best buddy lured into adventure by a madcap thrill seeker who both needs supervision and offers escape from the drabness of civilian life. The villain and the plot share elements of old-style anti-Freemason propaganda and comic-book superpowers aimed at world domination. There's a jocularity to the battles that indicates clearly that nobody is supposed to take all this seriously, perhaps not even seriously enough to try to patch the action episodes together into a coherent plot, which the Orlando Sentinal said "unravels in a...load of technohooey" eventually. And as is the case with comic-book epics, there is a tendency to treat death as a temporary condition to be abandoned when the need for action arises. And there's a heroine who is so much a captive of the story lines that there is little point in trying to figure out what she is up to or even whose side she is on, if anybody's.

As a comic-book spectacular, Sherlock Holmes is probably superior in a genre I studiously avoid. As a Sherlock Holmes story, it's Bruce Willis. It may well start a franchise, as is so obviously intended.