sherlock holmes

There was no rental DVD this weekend, so instead I watched the recent Guy Ritchie/Robert Downy Jr/Jude Law version of Sherlock Holmes.

This was actually my first proper Blu-Ray, having got my computer with a Blu-Ray set up a couple of weeks back (what a faff that was!) and I have to say it was, slightly surprisingly, a pleasant one.

This was slightly surprising, because I went in expecting not to like their version of Holmes. I'd heard talk of it being a "re-imagining" and that can be dangerous word. What I found was a rather entertaining and more faithful than expected version.

I can't pretend to be an expert on Sherlock Holmes. He's one of those characters where everybody knows who he is, but on the whole it's based mainly on acquired knowledge or the films they've seen. I do know that in films he's often presented as being older and less active than he was in the books. This is even more true of Watson, who's often depicted as being quite a lot older and fatter than Holmes.

In fact, when solving cases, Holmes and Watson were always dashing around and getting involved in fisticuffs. And Holmes of course is a master of disguises.

However, I'm not sure this was quite to the extent depicted in this film - there was clearly a desire to make Holmes something of an action hero, rather than spending all his time thinking about things and examining clues. Of course he does those too, but the focus is clearly on the running around and the fighting, rather than the thinking.

They've also tried to shoe-horn in a bit of a love interest and there's an interesting elevation of Watson to similar levels of deductive powers as Holmes. So they have changed stuff, but I think it all still works. The key is that this increased action and the sops to more conventional films all hang off a genuinely well thought out and executed plot with a reasonable mystery.

Visually and stylistically it all works - my first full Blu-Ray experience was good from this point of view.

If I was to make one criticism it would actually be with Downey Jr's accent. No, actually, that's not quite it - his accent is basically fine, my issue with more with how he's speaking.

For some reason they've gone for something akin to received pronunciation. You know all those old clips of people talking on the BBC where they speak in an oddly clear, almost accent-less way? That's received English.

Why I had a problem with this is because the whole point of it being received is that nobody actually ever spoke like that - it's an adopted style, so why would Holmes talk like that?

What also didn't help was that there seemed to be an attempt to include something of Johnny Depp's weird way of talking in Pirates of the Caribbean. This worked for that character, but doesn't make any sense for Holes.

It's a minor thing, really, but it did grate somewhat.