The Devil May Care

Like so many movie faggots, I have a specific area of interest. Some are interested in crappy horror films, some love middlebrow Oscarbait, and I love action films, so when I see an action film I may have a completely different reaction to it than most people. For most people, the worth of a film isn't teetering on the edge a cliff above a fiery abyss made of cancer, and they judge action films on weird garbage like "is the story original", but they all run screaming from the room when I pull out a David Lynch film, but I digress.

My point is, for me, action films are graded on a curve. I have to use every bit of strength in my body to resist giving Spider-Man 3 a 10/10 based on its action sequences, some of the best ever filmed, and remind myself of that film's narrative nightmare and the fact that it's an hour too long and features some really shitty performances. I'll dismiss an entire film in minutes if the action is done poorly, despite whatever assets it may have.

And Sherlock Holmes has assets pouring out of every orifice. The most obvious is Robert Downey Jr., if not, surely, the best working actor, at least my favorite. I can name a dozen actors that could out-act him in community college reproduction of Transformers 2, but not one man alive that is cooler than him. And casting him as Holmes was a stroke of absolute genius. Plus, we get Jude Law as Watson? And Mark Strong as the villain? How could this go wrong?

Guy Ritchie is how it can go wrong. I quite like Snatch., despite my pretentions towards serious film criticism and even Rocknrolla was a fun movie, so initially it didn't seem like such a problem. There was even a totally awesome, hyper-stylized chase scene in Rocknrolla that made me think Ritchie was a man who could handle action. But we'll get back to that in a moment.

Sherlock Holmes is a character I know you're all familiar with. When you're lazily insulting people for being unobservant, you're probably conjuring the great detective's image. In this instance, he's being filtered through Robert Downey Jr.'s persona, which is to say "eccentric genius", so it's a spectacular fit. He's being rewritten as an action hero, which is okay, because it was bound to happen eventually. And Watson, the original sidekick, is played pretty spectacularly by Jude Law, giving the film two excellent central performances that it doesn't deserve. Holmes and Watson play a bickering old Jewish couple who spend a lot of time getting into fistfights and stopping evil plots like most dynamic duos do. In this particular instance, we get that hoary old trick of establishing them as best buds in the whole world while they casually bring down a terrifying menace, only to send them home and into some lame marital problems. The whole opening is lazy and poorly realized, and it's probably the best part of the film overall.

The evil menace in this case is a certain Lord Blackwood, played by the brilliant Mark Strong who sadly doesn't get to be that brilliant in this film. He's been dabbling in black magic and murdering young women and thanks to Holmes and Watson, is hanged for his evil deeds. But before being hanged he promises to rise from the grave and take England for his own, and when he does it's up to Holmes to use logic to stop this seemingly supernatural menace.

So there's your plot, and it sounds okay. The only real question I have is why the filmmakers didn't get their teeth into the "logic vs. superstition" thematic territory that the film flirts with, but Sherlock Holmes commits worse crimes, so I won't dwell on that.

I know this is bad blogging (holy shit, I'm a faggot), but allow me to return to some earlier points, specifically the action scenes and the opening. From the first fight scene I thought that they had taken the action too far. For turn-of-the-century England it was far too bombastic and explodey, and was totally inappropriate for the story. The first fight scene in an action film generally serves as a teaser, usually being the tamest fight and as the film goes on the action will get bigger and more bombastic and explodey. I knew the film was going to fuck everything up from the outset, then, when the opening would barely be appropriate for the climax. The film would have been best served by a series of Indiana Jones-style brawls between Holmes and a small number of combatants. And maybe some fast-paced footchases. The action scenes are way too big a deal for a film like this, and I couldn't stand some of the setups. For instance, the climax is set up on a bridge under construction, but the characters don't go up there for any fucking reason. They just go up there. And then they fight. It leaves us with characters uninvested in their environment and looking like they're swordfighting between shots of absinthe.

The biggest violator of everything great about action films, though, is what's meant to be the showstopping setpiece at the center of the film. Holmes and Watson run into two men and a bloody giant in the slums of London. From its setup, it promises to be an exciting brawl as Watson fights the two men and Holmes uses his brainpowers to outwit the skyscraper. But the film's definition of "outwit" is "pick up a magical electric device that zaps the enemy to death and zap the enemy to death". That is, of course, until the redwood starts running away. Imagine the giant guy in Raiders of the Lost Ark running away from Indiana Jones and Indiana Jones chasing after him, rubbing sand in his eyes and taking his lunch money, and you'll get an idea of how this scene plays. Except he only runs away to set up a boring fight at a dock in the most contrived manner possible. So let's break this down really fast: exciting setup that has all its suspense sapped from it when we give our hero a magic weapon, and then the suspense is further sapped when the rhinoceros he's fighting fucking runs away and then we're supposed to be invested in the fight again when the tyke starts smashing everything for ten minutes while Holmes daintily steps out of the way. As a general rule of thumb, don't have your Robert Downey Jr.-sized man chase down a behemoth if you want the audience to be invested in your film.

And I haven't even commented on the insane editing yet. As I said before, there's an action scene in Rocknrolla that is some sort of post-modern action masterpiece with all its camera shakes and crazy angles, cameras mounted on the actors, etc., and the editing is the glue that holds the whole scene together. In this case, the editing is loose and confusing and serves only to sap any suspense or excitement from the fights. I can't say enough about how bad the action is, but I'll move on because there's so much more to discuss as it is.

The most obvious error the film commits is to include Rachel McAdams, who's a doll for sure, but has no business in this film and who I still harbor ill will towards. Aside from her character being totally useless to the plot and only being present so the teenage boys the film is targeted at can have something to look at (which is fine, she's great to look at), her primary function is to drop Moriarty's name. Moriarty's presence in this film could be fun, but it's so unsubtle and stupid, which could also be fun if played as affectionate kitsch, and unnecessary in doing anything but setting up the inevitable sequel. I'm surprised that they didn't look to another recent film that namedropped the universe's main villain in a way that was subtle and exciting and set up the film for a sequel without being overbearing.

Argh. This movie just has so much wrong with it. It's such a fucking shame because they hired the coolest man alive to play the part of the coolest man of the turn of the century, a time period with really cool clothes. The only parts where the film gets to shine are where it totally focuses on Downey Jr., namely the bits where Holmes explains his deductive method, and even more specifically, a scene in the opening where he plans out in his head exactly how he's going to take down an adversary and then executes it flawlessly.

There's no reason that this shouldn't be the best action film of the year, but it just fumbles on every occasion. It's worth seeing if you have the same homoerotic feelings for Robert Downey Jr. that I do, and especially if, like I do, you think that Jude Law is a certifiable badass and would consort with gypsies and dabble in the black arts to put them in a movie together. I get so frustrated thinking about this film because it's such a waste of such talented people.

But I have one shiny ray of hope. Guy Ritchie, in the past, has responded well to criticism. After the success of Lock Stock and Snatch and the subsequent failures of Swept Away and Revolver, he turned in the very fun Rocknrolla that was an answer to all his fans' criticisms. I hope that he heeds the critics' warnings in preparing his sequel, because there's no reason that this film shouldn't be the most fun thing in theaters.

4/10