This was a very fun movie. A very fun bastardization-of-classic-literature kind of movie.
Like a bastard, the movie bore several key resemblances to its very embarrassed parent. Robert Downey Jr.'s Sherlock is a drug-using, bare-knuckled fighting, lightning quick smartass. Everything that the original Holmes was in the books, except for the smartass part. He was British so it tended more toward dry witticisms referencing even more classical literature. Irene Adler was his female counterpart, a beautiful thief and blackmailer. Rachel McAdams plays her with an adorable insouciant vulnerability, handily dispatching a pair of thugs with a blackjack and knife, yet still somehow managing to be caught and trussed up like a Christmas goose so she could be rescued by the hero. Literary Irene Adler would sniff haughtily through her pert nose if anyone so much as suggested such a predicament.
Dr. Watson is probably the most likely to avoid a screenwriting paternity suit. Gone is the jovial rotund sidekick who blinks sheepishly in amazement at his cohort's leaps of deduction. Jude Law's Watson is more akin to Danny Glover's Murtaugh in Lethal Weapon. He rolls his eyes, sighs with forbearance, and grits his teeth when Holmes starts to enjoy his own cleverness a bit too much. He wants to put away his magnifying glass, settle down with the lovely Mary, and get back to his medical practice. If he could just get over the thrill of the chase!
Despite the burgeoning bro-mance at the heart of the film, it is not given overmuch to character development. Why would it need to when there are so many things in London to blow up? Action flows like cheap gin through Whitechapel with chases, immolations, and explosions. Witty quips abound. The good guys are very good and the bad guys are very bad so you always know who to root for. Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong) in particular exudes a scuzziness that's really only enhanced by his penchant for dark sorcery. The production is sleek and modern, one might even say glossy. Is it high art? Probably not, but the original stories were printed as magazine serials. So maybe the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
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