Re: What was the last movie you watched?
I saw the same Sherlock Holmes as Infurno did, though. We were not convinced of this new take on the Sherlock Holmes character at all. He is far from the calm master detective, but he's also a really cool bloke who fights a lot too? Apparently? Because, uh, I don't really know why, I guess the ADD culture could not bear seeing a movie with a "boring main character" who doesn't use his fists but his brains.
It's nice to see how he thinks in his early fights, but it's a shame that the writers dropped that idea after about twenty minutes. It'd be nice if you'd see that same kind of systematic thinking in the rest of the scenes, but most of the detective work is constantly interrupted by useless fights that slow down the pace of the thing. A 2-hour whopper that would have been radically more amusing if it'd just been 90 minutes.
Stale, uninteresting, underdeveloped, cardboard cutout characters without depth or emotion, annoyingly loud mixed sound (we were all close to dying, really), obnoxious explosions and fight scenes without any practical use. Other scenes that makes one frown, cheap laughs, a stereotypical, idiotic, far-fetched "woo, world domination" villain and horrible acting and dialogue from the extras in the film. These are not the things I'd expect from a Hollywood movie entitled "Sherlock Holmes".
It's a shame that the name of the film is the only correlation to the literary masterpieces by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle where Holmes and his sidekick Watson found their origins. In true Hollywood-tradition, Holmes had been promoted to Indiana Jones, but luckily he does remain his own cynical self. Hollywood seems to have decided to remove the gritty family un-friendly side of him, because Holmes' drug addiction is nowhere to be seen in this standard action movie. Undoubtedly, you've seen the story before.
For a film called "Sherlock Holmes", the actual detective work is not present enough. The plot isn't a mystery the viewer actually cares about or wants to find the solution too. It's practically impossible to do so, despite the "clever winks" troughout the story, that hint at the conclusion at the end. I had expected a detective movie. A deliciously slow movie filled with intrigues. Instead I got explosions and cultists.
On the emotional side, the film falls short as well. Where's the possibility for empathy? At no point throughout the film did I feel anything for the characters or was I bothered by what happened to them. Every chance the messy script offers at genuine emotion, is put aside nearly immediately. There's an interesting conflict between Holmes and Watson but it remains on the surface alone and never goes much deeper. The characters don't show their fragile sides and that makes them uninteresting and banal.
Somewhere halfway we're introduced to Irene Adler, a woman who - as the dialogue indicates later - is allegedly the titular character's love interest. Perhaps I fell asleep during a crucial scene only to wake up because of loud music or sound effects, but no emotions actually suggested this idea to me. The characters are all stoic and even if there is some emotion, it hardly alters anything.
The setting of the film, on the other hand, is amusing. Costuming is very well done and the atmosphere reminds well of that typical Victorian London that is portrayed so often, but it works. And yet, the makers clearly have not payed attention to London's city plan. During the climax, that very female character - who was so memorable that her name escapes me - makes her way through the sewage(?) from within the Houses of Parliament towards the top of an (at that time unfinished) London Bridge. The master thieve she is, apparently did not notice in her days before that in the city that the bridge was unfinished and that she'd hit a dead end.
I'd like to mention how Adler falling from the bridge was a good moment - only wish they'd shown where she fell instead of cutting to her being completely undamaged from falling in the next scene.
Nothing about this film is really positively memorable. The new interpretation of the Holmes and Watson characters are original and refreshing, but overall it just feels like a generic movie with the name "Sherlock Holmes" slapped on it because it needed a setting.
Every once in a while, the film evokes a laugh - be it on purpose or because it's all-round ridiculous - but in general, I found it frustrated me and gave me a headache.
