As the new and implausible Sherlock Holmes, Robert Downey Jr. again lends his eccentric charms and complexly freighted persona -- post-meltdown, he has cultivated and strategically deployed a hair-trigger vulnerability, as though complete dissolution is always one of twelve steps away -- to a role that doesn't deserve them. Guy Ritchie and a posse of screenwriters (including Anthony Peckham, who wrote Invictus) seem to have reconceived Arthur Conan Doyle's methodical, champion sleuther with Downey in mind; now he's more of a self-destructive wag with a sociopathic commitment to sussing out everything from advanced chemical reactions to your fiancée's psychological profile. As the central bad boy in Ritchie's painfully macho, laboriously kinetic conception of a spooky, nineteenth century murder mystery, Downey pushes his own schtick to its logical end -- tedium -- and then somehow lugs it right on through to the other side, arriving at something like grudging admiration. That's dedication, but is it art?
For Ritchie and everyone else involved in this film, the answer is a big old nay. The storyline is tortured beyond recognition, Holmes is a ridiculous hybrid of madman and superhero, and the broad, hammy action set pieces are a clear and cynical grab at a Pirates of the Caribbean-type franchise. Some redemption is found in the friendship between Holmes and Dr. John Watson (Jude Law); when their deeply rooted bromance is threatened by Watson's engagement to a dull woman named Mary Morstan (Kelly Reilly), Holmes is reduced to his most petulant dudgeon. The two nip at each other like old ladies, scuffle like little boys, and most importantly, strike manly poses together in seriously natty threads. Certainly they share more chemistry than all the cleavage and lipstick at Rachel McAdam's disposal is able to generate between Holmes and her character, a former flame and current grifter named Irene Adler.
Overloading the script by several orders of amplitude, the mystery devised for Holmes's delectation involves a megalomaniac named Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong) who claims to have Satanic powers that he intends to use to "raise a force that will alter the course of the world." Oh really? Doesn't anybody just off prostitutes anymore? Substituting grandiosity for actual engaging material (or modern thematic resonance), Ritchie takes the exploits of Lord Blackwood, who appears to have risen from the dead after his execution by hanging and was part of a Skull and Bones-style gentlemen's club that practices "the black arts," to the far reaches of incredulity, leaving his viewers toeing the ground and pondering the more involving mystery of whether Mark Strong is actually Andy Garcia with really good plastic surgery. I'm not sure actual fans of Sherlock Holmes or Doyle would make it past the credits sequence.
Intent, obviously, on saving the world, when not ensconced in his putrid home laboratory or engaging in a little shirtless streetfighting, Holmes adds his powers of deduction to those of disguise and ass-kicking to stop Lord Blackwood from committing mass murder in the parliament, lest he convince the populace he's some sort of god and control them with fear. McAdams, whose Adler is a double agent with motivations that are never clear nor much cared about, is punching well above her weight with charisma vortexes like Downey and Law. Ritchie, who didn't know what to do with his own wife on the screen, is hardly a female-friendly director, yet McAdams herself, speaking in bland tones and straining to her hit her marks in a series of froufy get-ups, seems lost in an admittedly lightweight but potentially more memorable part.
Ritchie seems focused on nailing all of his extravagantly conceived plot points (along with Satanic rituals, black magic, resurrection, and spontaneous combustion, the world's first chemical weapon figures in) if only so Holmes can enumerate them to his nemesis in a climactic, gotcha scene that is set, naturally, on an exposed beam way high up in the air. By that point you hardly care who did what to whom when, where and why; I was already 20 minutes into a detailed review of the increasingly untenable case for Guy Ritchie's career.