W h i t e B e a r s

Sherlock Holmes was an awful film.

tmblg:
He may have spoken indecipherably, but this was one of the few recent big-$ action hero movies (viz. Dark Knight) whose actions scenes were more than coloured blurbs of fury — I could actually tell who was hitting whom and even understood why. That’s valuable and rare. 60 million-valuable-&-rare? Maybe.

timwilkinson:

How the fuck did it make $60M+ this weekend?

Hear, hear! I couldn’t understand a god damn word that Robert Downey Jr. was saying. His accent was awful.

I, unlike you, could not tell who was hitting whom. Even when he explained it to me.

OK, maybe this has to do with the fact that I saw it in the second row of a theatre in Rome, and I was basically head-level with Italian subtitles as big as myself. But Sherlock Holmes was a breaking-point movie for me, in the way that Transformers 2 was a breaking point for Roger Ebert. I have now seen this movie - as in, the movie that follows this particular formula - so many times that I no longer see the movie. I only recognize the broad strokes.

So oh yeah, we start in medias res with some high-voltage action scene from the perspective of the baddies. Music is loud, then drops suddenly to a tense sotto voce mostly cause a loud, pounding soundtrack doesn’t have much option for modulation. At some precisely timed moment the music surges back. Opening sequence is usually the best part of the movie, and then we move into an hour and a half of plot twists that are only twists because the protagonist doesn’t share anything that is valuable with us, but will instead reveal it all at the end, the baddie remaining all the while alive only so long to hear the whole spiel. (Seriously: when Mark Strong was hanging on the rope, and dropped metre by metre with accompanying spasms of music, precisely between RDJ’s carefully punctuated paragraphs, did someone at some point really think that we would find that suspenseful? Or interesting?)

And the big climax of the movie will happen in slo-mo and with the sound dampened with classical music/irish folksong over it mostly because when you make a movie where every scene is fighting to be the Most Exciting One, your actual Most Exciting Scene can only stand out by being the opposite of every other - that is to say, quiet and slow. And Rachel McAdams taking off her coat so you have the two seconds of bare flesh you can put in the trailer (who seriously believed they would see Rachel McAdams topless? In this movie?) and like, the race to noon, and the last five minutes of the movie which are really a trailer for the next movie, nowhere more shameless and money-grubbing than in this one. Ready for my one-liner? “Case reopened? … more like wallet reopened.”

Zing.