We meet Sherlock Holmes [Robert Downey Jr.] as he has caught Lord Blackwood [Mark Strong] in the act of attempting to murder his very next victim.  Lord Blackwood is then sent to jail and hanged.  However, shortly after there are words of Lord Blackwood being back from the dead and powerful men are being murdered all across London.  Holmes must solve this mystery along with his friend Dr. Watson [Jude Law].

Here is a good old fashioned fun action adventure film about a detective using his immense powers of deduction to find the truth.  We are posed with a mystery of the dark arts and Holmes must follow the clues that aren’t always what they appear to be.

If I were to call this movie anything short of brilliant I would be lying.  The movie never poses itself as a serious mystery film where it attempts to give the audience a chance to use their own little grey cells to try and solve the puzzle, but rather it carries you along from scene to scene with a batch of loveable hilarious characters that you won’t soon want to forget.  Jude Law and Robert Downey Jr. end up being quite possibly one of the best on screen partnership I’ve seen in a while.  They seem to always be able to know exactly what notes to hit with each other, how much of their dialogue/banter between each other was scripted and how much was improvised is hard to tell but I imagine that they definitely had some fun as these two classic characters.

To my surprise even as much as I loved Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law as Sherlock and Watson, I found myself even more in love with Mark Strong as Lord Blackwood.  He plays the dark mysterious villain that you wonder how he does the things he does.  There were certain moments though that I loved because Mr. Strong played his part perfectly.  Like when Holmes comes to visit Blackwood in his cell before his hanging and he just shifts from the side of the cell to the bars and delivers that line so terrifyingly, “you must widen your gaze” it just stuck with me.

My biggest and only complaint on the film is that I was highly disappointed by Rachel McAdams and how she played Irene Adler the master thief.  Her performance fell completely flat in this film and especially next to the three other leads in the movie it just doesn’t even come close.  I know that she was probably cast for the sake of her eye candy factor alone (and that is there), but I like it when my actresses can act well in their roles.  I’ve been a small fan of Rachel McAdams since I saw her in two really good movies in 2009 (The Time Traveler’s Wife and State of Play) in which I think she delivered some serviceable performances, but here she just seems useless and the role would’ve been better in the hands of a more suited actress.

My biggest question is how close is this to your grandfather’s Sherlock Holmes?  I knew Sherlock as a man of logic (which is there) but I don’t remember him as a hand-to-hand combat expert.  Now please don’t take this as me complaining, I loved those moments where Downey was fighting.  It was so cool to see the man of logic use his mental skills to plan out his attack and then show us him putting that plan into effect.  At first when we were shown this at the beginning of the film I had worries that it may get annoying if Ritchie decides to do it too often, but it was used with the proper amount of foresight by the writers.  It never got old and never felt like a way to make the movie cooler but rather something that was just a part of the Holmes character.

In the end this is a fun movie that everyone in the family will definitely enjoy.  Go and check this out and see Guy Ritchie direct a movie that isn’t a British mobster flick and at the same time really good.

IMDB says 7.7/10

Rotten Tomatoes says 69%

I say 8.5/10