Sherlock Holmes

Spanks - 3

Director - Guy Ritchie

Writer - Michael Robert Johnson and Anthony Peckham and Simon Kinberg

Starring - Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, Rachel McAdams, Mark Strong & Eddie Marsan

Release Date - 25 December 2009

MPAA Rating - PG-13

Sherlock Holmes has been adapted into films over 200 times since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published his first print appearance in 1887. This is Holmes' the first appearance in a major motion picture in the 2000s (that I can recall). The film is not your normal Hollywood origin story. The film begins with Holmes and Watson being introduced by solving a case involving a serial killer. Cut to a few months later and we find out Watson is getting married and Holmes gets his next case, the case the movie follows.

Being a film by Guy Richie, I expected a lot of crazy twist and plot developments you come to expect from a Richie film. But being the film wasn't written by him, you get generic plot development and little suspense. I hope the planned sequel is written with a lot more input from Richie and takes more of what he has done brilliantly in the films he has written and directed previously.

If you go without the expectations I had for it, it is probably a good movie. The people I saw it with enjoyed it a lot. I thought the soundtrack by Hans Zimmer was different sounding and amazing. The design team did a good job recreating London in the 1890s. Robert Downey Jr. brings Holmes to live as well as he did with Tony Stark. Everything was in the right place for Sherlock Holmes to be a great film, but it shows in this film how a wrong story can mess up everything.