Elementary

One Christmas long ago my brother and I received a pair of novels. His was a collection of Edgar Allen Poe, and mine was a collection of Arthur Conan Doyle's stories of Sherlock Holmes. I fell in love with the character, and today consider this fictional hero a wonderful introduction to the work of a scientist. He was methodical, observant, and careful to always put observation before theory. Moreover, he was endlessly curious, taking cases because of their difficulty, not because they were easy.

These sides of the fictional detective have been captured in movies galore. But they usually failed to capture some of Holmes other qualities--his martial skills as a fencer and boxer, his slovenly ways, and his maniacal focus on a case.

So you can imagine my delight when I heard that Guy Ritchie (of Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch fame) was directing a Sherlock Holmes movie. Ritchie has built a career out of constructing intricate action films with thugs in the leading role. Men for whom violence was not an abstraction, but an integral part of their world. That is how the Holmes stories felt to me. Some (like "The Hound of the Baskervilles") took place in rarefied settings, but most of the short stories took place in the grimy streets of the London underground. Holmes dove headfirst into these settings, disguising himself until he became one with the criminal element.

For me, the movie did not disappoint. The classic Watson Holmes banter was there, and the offhand deductive showpieces, but also a strong sense of Holmes as character actually driven to solve a case, who experiments with drugs and insects, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of London and its environs.

I have noted critics expressed surprise at Holmes in an action movie, but seem to forget that Holmes was the character who fought Moriarty atop a waterfall to the death. Holmes was not an armchair detective, but someone who put all his energy and action into a case. This is a fresh, fun take on Holmes that is rife with clues for the observant, a solvable mystery, and yes, action packed sequences that give new life to industrial era London. Grime included.

Sherlock Holmes
4 1/2 out of 5 stars