Sherlock Holmes: Critic Reviews

Sherlock Holmes, while a diverting enough night out, is both fun and numb, enjoyable and exhausting. It's a case of more adding up to less.

It seems that an evil aristocrat, executed for a series of murders, returns from the dead to mobilize an ancient secret society that he may have time-traveled into a Dan Brown novel to learn about. Doesn't that sound fascinating? I thought not.

[Guy Ritchie] has managed to steal hours of precious time belonging to cinemagoers everywhere for his latest silly escapade.

It's a hollow attempt at modernisation, and quickly grows dull. Watson's big dilemma - whether to quit his life with Holmes for marriage to lovely Mary has, at heart, all the depth of a Wham! song.

Old London, achieved via superb visual effects, is breathtaking in its grimy verisimilitude. And Downey is charming. But his world is jarringly frenetic, in the manner of most Ritchie films.

At times, Ritchie and company try so hard to make sure this isn't your father's Sherlock Holmes that it comes across as, well, cartoonish.

Downey never winks -- hea(TM)s too much of a pro for that -- but like the man hea(TM)s playing, hea(TM)s much, much smarter than the movie hea(TM)s in.

[Downey] brings a wry conviction to even the most hackneyed part or ridiculously written role.

Though purists may balk at Arthur Conan Doyle's literary world being manhandled into a blockbuster by never-subtle director Guy Ritchie, Downey has a winning take on Holmes: He's always on.

The movie as a whole is clever, and conspicuously overwrought. But Mr. Downey's performance is elegantly wrought; he's as quick-witted as his legendary character.

This is rip-roaring action-adventure of high order, a sometimes dizzying but ultimately thrilling display of showmanship on the part of the actors, director and screenwriters.

It's all knotted together, then unraveled with brio, by Holmes and Watson. There are fisticuffs galore, fiery combustion aplenty, and, yes, my dear reader, clever deduction.

"Sherlock Holmes" may feel a little too modern, more adrenaline than brain-power, more brash than British, but it's an all right action-pleasure if you don't mind that the game's more a-fist than afoot.

By now we've seen so many good, bad, and indifferent Sherlocks that it's almost a relief to get something different, however wrongheaded. And there's no such thing as too much Downey.

Downey and Law are terrific together. For me, watching them act is the movie's principal pleasure.

The less I thought about Sherlock Holmes, the more I liked Sherlock Holmes.

This spazzy, sour project is to every previous Holmes picture as the Stephen Sommers Mummy pictures are to the great 1932 creeper The Mummy.

The very idea of handing him over to professional lad Guy Ritchie, to be played as a punch-throwing quipster by Robert Downey Jr., is so profoundly stupid one can only step back in dismay.

The game is not afoot.

This is a swashbuckling, pratfalling romp designed to make cerebral Holmes purists drop their monocles into their teacups.

If Sherlock Holmes truly is the world's most keen detective, surely he would have sniffed out that this film was a stinker.

Playing literature's greatest detective as a sort of self-loathing action hero, Downey has an absolute blast. And thanks to his performance in Sherlock Holmes, so do we.

Mr. Ritchie is one of the worst bogus "directors" in film history. I just hoped he might have grown up enough to enlighten the world about the secret lives of two of my favorite mystery characters. Alas, they're both as cardboard as a Madonna lobby

If you can get over the idea of Sherlock Holmes as an action hero -- and if, indeed, you want to -- then there is something to enjoy about this flagrant makeover of fiction's first modern detective into a man of brawn as much as brain.