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Sherlock Holmes
EMAILPRINTWarner Bros. Pictures

Mixed or average reviews
Based on 34 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 217 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Action | Adventure | Crime | Drama | Mystery | Suspense/Thriller
Written by:
Michael Johnson
Anthony Peckham
Guy Ritchie
Directed by: Guy Ritchie
Release Date:
Theatrical: December 25, 2009
DVD: March 30, 2010
Running Time: minutes, Color
Origin: UK | Australia | USA
Summary
RATING: PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, some startling images and a scene of suggestive material
Starring Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, Rachel McAdams, Mark Strong, Eddie Marsan, and Kelly Reilly
Sherlock Holmes has made his reputation finding the truth at the heart of the most complex mysteries. With the aid of Dr. John Watson, his trusted ally, the renowned "consulting detective" is unequaled in his pursuit of criminals of every stripe, whether relying on his singular powers of observation, his remarkable deductive skills, or the blunt force of his fists. But now a storm is gathering over London, a threat unlike anything that Holmes has ever confronted...and just the challenge he's looking for. (Warner Bros.)
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
New York Daily News Joe Neumaier
Downey has a winning take on Holmes: He's always on.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps
This is very much a Sherlock Holmes movie for the blockbuster era.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
The less I thought about Sherlock Holmes, the more I liked "Sherlock Holmes." Yet another classic hero has been fed into the f/x mill, emerging as a modern superman.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Ty Burr
It pleases me to report, then, that Downey brings his brain, his wit, and his gift for intelligent underplaying, even as he understands he has been hired to play Sherlock Holmes, action hero.
Read Full Review >Premiere Nick Starkey
Hey, remember “fun”? If you’re sick of the apocalypse and tortured anti-heroes, then you need to see Sherlock Holmes. It’s a blast from start to finish.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
There's a mystery at the heart of Sherlock Holmes, and it's not the one the great master of detection has been called on to solve. It's how a film that has so many good things going for it has turned out to be solid but not spectacular.
Read Full Review >Variety Todd McCarthy
Ritchie has never worked on a scale anything approaching this before and, while some of the directorial affectations are distracting, he keeps the action humming.
Read Full Review >The New Yorker David Denby
Challenged by Downey’s energy, Jude Law, who often seems aimless in his movies, comes fully up to speed. He’s virile and quick-witted, and his Watson, if not Holmes’s equal in brainpower, comes close to him in daring. Their repartee evokes the banter of lovers in a screwball comedy; they flirt outrageously but chastely.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
The movie as a whole is clever, and conspicuously overwrought. But Mr. Downey's performance is elegantly wrought; he's as quick-witted as his legendary character, and blithely funny in the lovers' spats—all right, the mystery-lovers' spats—that Holmes keeps having with Jude Law's witty Dr. Watson.
Read Full Review >The New York Times A.O. Scott
There are worse things than loutish, laddish cool, and as a series of poses and stunts, Sherlock Holmes is intermittently diverting.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov
Here's hoping that younger members of the audience will seek out Conan Doyle's original stories to further explore Holmes' official amanuensis, Dr. John Watson, whose brilliant case studies regarding his friend, roommate, and fellow rationalist are the stuff dreams are made of.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
Sherlock Holmes is an odd amalgam, a top-heavy light entertainment that keeps throwing things at you and doesn't seem too concerned with whether they stick.
Read Full Review >New Orleans Times-Picayune Mike Scott
Ritchie and company spend too much time being cute and not enough time being clever, resulting in a one-dimensional comic-book version of Doyle's detectives.
Read Full Review >USA Today Claudia Puig
Sherlock Holmes has been reimagined with fighting skills as potent as his intellectual acumen.
Read Full Review >St. Louis Post-Dispatch Joe Williams
The result is only half as hip as hoped. Yes, this Holmes is leaner and meaner, and Watson (Jude Law) is nearly his equal. But there’s still something fussy about the result, as if bobbies had broken up the party at 11:59.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
The reason Sherlock Holmes fails at least as often as it succeeds is because more effort and attention was lavished upon the concept than upon the script. Given a worthy story, Downey's Holmes might have been memorable. Here, he's an interesting character in search of a worthwhile story.
Read Full Review >Empire William Thomas
A fun, action-packed reintroduction to Conan Doyle's classic characters. Part Two should provide more in the way of scope.
Read Full Review >NPR Bob Mondello
In short, Ritchie's come up with precisely what you'd expect of him — a pumped-up, anachronistically modern Sherlock Holmes designed for the ADD crowd. Expect a sequel. Or six.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine David Edelstein
By now we’ve seen so many good, bad, and indifferent Sherlocks that it’s almost a relief to get something different, however wrongheaded. And there’s no such thing as too much Downey.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey
Guy Ritchie's Holmes reboot feels both too complicated and too elementary, dear Watson.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
With a clamorous soundtrack and a whirl of elaborate chases and busily choreographed fight scenes, this is Sherlock Holmes with Attention Deficit Disorder.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
Despite some arresting visual flourishes and Downey’s inherent likeability, it’s nearly incoherent both as cinema and as story. No, this isn’t your grandfather’s or your father’s Sherlock Holmes, but if theirs featured Basil Rathbone or Jeremy Brett in the lead, it was better by miles.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
Guy Ritchie is the worst screenwriter in the world, but, to be fair, he is not the worst director. He is only the worst director of the people who actually get to make movies.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
Not even Sherlock Holmes could make much sense out of the overplotted, murky mess that is "Sherlock Holmes," although Arthur Conan Doyle's legendarily brainy detective would probably never buy a ticket to a movie as elephant-footed as this one.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
Ritchie is all about the whooshing and headbanging, leaving no space between Holmes' words to savor their meaning. Downey is irresistible. The movie, not so much.
Read Full Review >Village Voice J. Hoberman
As over-emphatic as one might expect from the ham-fisted Guy Ritchie, this resurrection of the world's most famous detective is a dank, noisy affair.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
This is certainly the grubbiest Holmes in movie history.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt
Sherlock Holmes goes wrong in many ways except for one -- at the boxoffice.
Read Full Review >Time Out New York Joshua Rothkopf
This is the ultimate sin of the film, generically helmed by lad-auteur Guy Ritchie: Logic seems to be thrown out the window in order to make room for clashes on a partially completed Tower Bridge. It’s way too elementary.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
It's a serious drag to see how Ritchie has turned Holmes and Dr. Watson into a couple of garden-variety thugs.
Read Full Review >New York Post Kyle Smith
Sherlock Holmes dumbs down a century-old synonym for intelligence with S&M gags, witless sarcasm, murky bombast and twirling action-hero moves that belong in a ninja flick.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Michael O'Sullivan
This "Holmes" is just about as silly as it awesome. At times, Ritchie and company try so hard to make sure this isn't your father's "Sherlock Holmes" that it comes across as, well, cartoonish.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader J.R. Jones
The very idea of handing him over to professional lad Guy Ritchie (who directed Snatch, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels), to be played as a punch-throwing quipster by Robert Downey Jr., is so profoundly stupid one can only step back in dismay.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 6.7 (out of 10) based on 217 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Steve F gave it a9:
Critics are totally wrong on this movie..I thought it was really great.
Sam J gave it a4:
This movie was boring. It was also very gray; not fun to look at, and it didn't make any sense.
Len V gave it a9:
This picture currently has the same grade as Downey's other recent blockbuster, "Iron Man 2." Both average out to a 57. That's difficult to comprehend, since the Iron Man sequel is a piece of garbage, while this movie is full of all of the suspense that the Iron Man sequel failed to capture. Applying Sherlock Holmes-like deduction to this case, I can only guess that the critics have used different standards in evaluating "Sherlock Holmes," treating it as a literary adaptation. Well, it's not Arthur Conan Doyle; it's based on a comic book version. And the result is actually better than yet another stuffy Doyle adaptation would have been: it's stylish, funny, exciting. I'm disappointed to see critics sniff at "Sherlock Holmes" just because there's a book somewhere behind it. The only misstep is Rachel McAdams, who plays her role seductively but makes it hard to imagine that she was ever a master criminal.
Matthew W gave it a5:
Let me begin by saying that "Sherlock Holmes" is a lot of fun. That said, as a movie about Sherlock Holmes, it is a failure. As a lifelong fan of the stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, I have seen many screen adaptations and interpretations of his most enduring creation, and this movie simply fails to do the subject matter any kind of justice. While billed, somewhat schizophrenically, as both a "return to origin" and "reinterpretation", the film definitely inclines to the latter. A romance is added, as is an emphasis on chop-socky action and physical comedy. The joy of the Holmes stories, and of all his best films, is the unraveling of the mystery. Here the mystery takes a back seat, serving as a vehicle to propel the film from one frenetic action sequence to another. The fights are kinetic and exciting, but ultimately many of them seem included for their own sake, not the sake of the story. This is truly a Sherlock Holmes for the MTV generation. Between the whizz-bang fights, some plot sometimes occurs. There is not very much, however, and what is there is underwhelming. Mark Strong is given little to do as the main villian, and his nefarious scheme does not hold up to close scrutiny. Rachel McAdams plays a totally reimagined Irene Adler, who is now a master criminal and Sherlock Holmes's love interest, a development which never appears in Conan Doyle's books. Love, in the books, is anathema to Holmes, and he would no sooner form a romantic relationship than dance naked down the Strand. A good Sherlock Holmes story must remain within the parameters that Conan Doyle set down. It must be a convincing story about Sherlock Holmes. Otherwise, why have it be about Holmes at all? Why not a different detective? The obvious answer is, of course, because the Holmes name is arguably one of the most famous brands in the English speaking world. But this is not an excuse to run roughshod over such a unique character. This is not to say that the movie is without its strong points. Quite apart from its failings as a Sherlock Holmes adventure, it is fun and features two fanstic actors (Downey and Law) as Holmes and Watson. The fights are, admittedly exciting, and the views of 1800s London are top-knotch. I can only hope that the sequel will include more plot, more mystery, and more of Conan Doyle's Holmes, not Guy Ritchie's.
Mike B gave it a9:
Cleverly done and entertaining.
Batjin gave it an8:
First of all Downey and Jude were both very good. The story was not as good as the acting. As a whole it was a decent movie. To the crics who gave 50 or below: we are living in the 21st century, where the real stories that Conan Doyle wrote wouldn't satisfy as a blockbuster movie, it needs to be embellished with fast paced action scenes (or a bit of comedy). Although I am a big fan of the books I found the slight change in the story entertaining.
Hyper S gave it an8:
The visuals (action sequences and scenery) were superb. The acting was great. And the story, while briefly making you think "oh great some unrealistic supernatural trash", comes together nicely in the end. Yes the "old" Holmes is no more in this movie.. but honestly... a more badass "I'm going to not only kick your ass with my mind, but with my fists as well" opens the door to far more interesting encounters and simply...a far more entertaining movie.
