[NOTE: this post is part of a series of reviews, the rules of which are listed in the little image there or here at the initial post in the series. If you are a nervous reader or prone to complaining, please read the rules first!]
[click on image for a big whopping readable version]
To add to what’s written above, two things:
1) Robert Downey Jr.’s accent in this movie is a crime. In the first movie, which was dumb but pleasant, his accent was just a little silly but serviceable. In this one it’s like he’s doing a Saturday Night Live sketch. Except that right there with him is someone with an actual regular British accent (Jude Law), which makes Robert Downey Jr. seem a little like that one theater-type at a party with a bunch of non theater-types.
2) In the positive column: by the end you’re so used to his accent that it somehow adds to that dumb-but-pleasant texture to the movie. In order to enjoy the movie at all, you have to just kind of surrender to Robert Downey Jr. and his cartoon mouth and eyes. If you don’t, this is a terrible terrible movie. If you do, it’s a fun movie to watch in a theater with big sound and things whooshing everywhere.
ssssllllooooowww mmmmooootttiiiooonnnn…
Excellent review, Mr. Harbin. I enjoyed the first movie and have not seen the second, so you are providing practical information.
The thing is, Sherlock Holmes is kind of a ninja. He was a master boxer, fencer, and cane fighter, as well as knowing bartitsu (or baritsu as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle mistyped it), which was basically the world’s first mixed martial art. Otherwise I agree. I also found the plot to be very easy to unravel.
Well that may be. I’ve read all those stories, although it’s been a few years, but I don’t remember him as such a physical character. And I don’t mind people changing source material–a movie is a different from prose, and you have to do some things differently. But so much of those movies is about setting up Sherlock as a Batman-type physical badass, that they occasional instances of him actually deducing something come across as forced. Like, “oh and on top of all that he’s wizard at mysteries too!” It’s a division of focus that, while visually distracting, doesn’t do much for the character. After a week or so, the character who sticks out in my head is Jude Law’s, whose flashiest skill was shooting straight with a pistol.