| Sherlock Holmes | |
|---|---|
 Theatrical poster |
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| Directed by | Guy Ritchie |
| Produced by | Joel Silver Lionel Wigram Susan Downey Dan Lin |
| Written by | Michael Robert Johnson Anthony Peckham Simon Kinberg Lionel Wigram (Story) Arthur Conan Doyle (Characters) |
| Starring | Robert Downey, Jr. Jude Law Rachel McAdams Mark Strong |
| Music by | Hans Zimmer |
| Cinematography | Philippe Rousselot |
| Editing by | James Herbert |
| Studio | Silver Pictures Village Roadshow Pictures |
| Distributed by | Warner Bros. Pictures |
| Release date(s) | December 24, 2009 December 25, 2009 (United States) December 26, 2009 (United Kingdom) (Australia) |
| Running time | 128 minutes |
| Country | United Kingdom United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $90 million[1] |
| Gross revenue | $498,472,164[2] |
| Followed by | Sherlock Holmes 2 |
Sherlock Holmes is a 2009 action mystery film based on the character of the same name created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The film was directed by Guy Ritchie and produced by Joel Silver, Lionel Wigram, Susan Downey and Dan Lin. The screenplay by Michael Robert Johnson, Anthony Peckham and Simon Kinberg was developed from a story by Lionel Wigram and Michael Robert Johnson. Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law portray Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson, respectively. Holmes investigates a series of murders, apparently connected to occult rituals. Lord Blackwood is the mysterious villain. The story culminates with a confrontation on top of Tower Bridge, still under construction.
The film went on general release in the United States on December 25, 2009, and on December 26, 2009, in the UK, Ireland, and the Pacific.[3]
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In 1891 London, Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey, Jr.) and Dr. John Watson (Jude Law) race to prevent the ritual murder of a girl by Lord Henry Blackwood (Mark Strong), who has killed five other people similarly. They are able to stop the murder just in time. Inspector Lestrade (Eddie Marsan) and the police arrive to make the arrest. Three months later, Blackwood is sentenced to death and requests to see Holmes, who visits him in prison. He warns Holmes of three more impending deaths that will cause great changes to the world. Blackwood is hanged and declared dead by Dr. Watson.
Holmes receives a surprise visit at 221B Baker Street from Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams), a professional thief and his former lover, who asks him to find a missing man named Reordan. After her departure, Holmes discreetly follows her as she meets with a man, her secret employer, hidden in the shadows of a carriage. The concealed man states that Reordan is the key to Blackwood's plans.
Three days later, Blackwood's tomb is destroyed from the inside out. Reordan is found dead inside Blackwood's coffin. A groundskeeper claims to have seen Blackwood walking from the tomb. Following a series of clues from the body, Holmes and Watson find Reordan's home and discover experiments attempting to merge science with magic. Later, Holmes is taken to the Temple of the Four Orders, an occult-dabbling secret society. The leaders, Sir Thomas (James Fox) and Home Secretary Lord Coward (Hans Matheson), ask Holmes to stop Blackwood, a former member of the Order. Sir Thomas and another senior member of the group are later killed through apparently magical means by Blackwood, allowing him to assume control. He plans to push for Britain to retake the United States, weakened by civil war. Lord Coward, who was in league with Blackwood all along, issues a warrant for Holmes' arrest.
When Holmes learns he is wanted by the police he goes into hiding and studies Blackwood's rituals, concluding the next target is British Parliament. Holmes tricks Lord Coward into revealing that the plan is to wipe out the House of Lords and then rejoins Adler and Watson. The three sneak into the sewers beneath Parliament and discover a machine, based on Reordan's experiments, designed to release a cyanide derivative into the Parliament chambers. They fight off Blackwood's men, and remove the cyanide containers from the machine. Adler grabs the cylinders and races away, pursued by Holmes. Blackwood and Coward realize their plan has failed. Blackwood manages to get away while Coward is captured.
Holmes confronts Adler on top of the incomplete Tower Bridge but is interrupted by Blackwood. Holmes tricks him into becoming entangled in the ropes and chains, hanging over the Thames while Holmes recounts the technical trickery behind all of Blackwood's supposed magic. A loose beam falls off the rafter supports, causing Blackwood to fall and die by hanging from the chains.
Adler finally explains that her employer is Professor Moriarty, warning that Moriarty is as intelligent as Holmes but more devious. Later, the police report to Holmes and Watson that a dead officer was found near Blackwood's device. Professor Moriarty used the confrontations with Adler and Blackwood as a diversion while he took a key component from the machine. This prompts Holmes to accept the new case.
Director Guy Ritchie declined to say who voiced the character of Professor Moriarty. Rumors suggested that the part was voiced by Brad Pitt, who has been reported to have expressed strong interest in the sequel.[22] Actor Ed Tolputt is credited as "Anonymous Man"[23] although it is not clear if this refers to Moriarty.[24]
A lot of the action that Conan Doyle refers to was actually made manifest in our film. Very often, Sherlock Holmes will say things like, 'If I hadn't been such an expert short stick person, I would have died in that' or he would refer to a fight off screen. We're putting those fights on screen.
Producer Lionel Wigram remarked that for around ten years, he had been thinking of new ways to depict Sherlock Holmes. "I realized the images I was seeing in my head [when reading the stories] were different to the images I'd seen in previous films." He imagined "a much more modern, more bohemian character, who dresses more like an artist or a poet", namely Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. After leaving his position as executive for Warner Bros. in 2006,[5] Wigram sought a larger scope to the story so it could attract a large audience, and amalgamated various Holmes stories to flesh it out further.[7] Lord Blackwood's character was developed as a nod to Victorian interests in spiritualism and the later influence of Aleister Crowley. [25] The producer felt he was "almost clever" pitting Holmes, who has an almost supernatural ability to solve crimes, against a supposedly supernatural villain. Wigram wrote and John Watkiss drew a 25-page comic book about Holmes in place of a spec script.[25] Professor Moriarty's existence is hinted in the script to set up the sequels.[26]
In March 2007, Warner Bros. chose to produce, seeing similarities in the concept with Batman Begins. Arthur Conan Doyle's estate had some involvement in sorting out legal issues, although the stories are in the public domain in the United States. Neil Marshall was set to direct,[27] but Guy Ritchie signed on to direct in June 2008.[28] When a child at boarding school, Ritchie and other pupils listened to the Holmes stories through dormitory loudspeakers. "Holmes used to talk me to sleep every night when I was seven years old," he said.[29] Therefore, his image of Holmes differed from the films. He wanted to make his film more "authentic" to Doyle,[8] explaining, "There's quite a lot of intense action sequences in the stories, [and] sometimes that hasn't been reflected in the movies."[30] Holmes' "brilliance will percolate into the action", and the film will show that his "intellect was as much of a curse as it was a blessing".[9] Ritchie sought to make Sherlock Holmes a "very contemporary film as far as the tone and texture", because it has been "a relatively long time since there's been a film version that people embraced".[30]
Filming began in October 2008.[31] The crew shot at Freemasons' Hall and St Paul's Cathedral.[32][26] Filming was done in Manchester's Northern Quarter, while the Town Hall was used for a fight scene (which required smashing stained glass windows).[33] They shot the opening scene for three days at St Bartholomew-the-Great church in London,[25] and shot on the river Thames at Wapping for a scene involving a steamboat on 7 November.[34] Filming continued at Stanley Dock and Clarence Dock in Liverpool.[35] Street scenes were filmed in cobbled alleyways in Chatham and Manchester. Brompton Cemetery in London was used for a key scene, and the palatial 19th-century interior of the Reform Club stood in for the Café Royal. Scenes from the interior of 221B Baker Street were shot on a sound stage at Leavesden Studios.[32]
In late November 2008, actor Robert Maillet, who played Dredger, was filming a fight scene at Chatham Dockyard in Kent, and accidentally punched Robert Downey, Jr. in the face, causing Downey to be bloodied and knocked down, but not knocked unconscious as originally reported.[21] The Sun reported that on November 28, a tank truck caught fire, forcing filming to stop for two hours.[36] When filming at St John's Street in December, the schedule had to be shortened from 13 to nine days because locals complained about how they would always have to park cars elsewhere during the shoot.[37] In January 2009, filming moved to Brooklyn.[38]
Ritchie wanted his Holmes' costume to play against the popular image of the character, joking "there is only one person in history who ever wore a deerstalker". Downey selected the character's hat, a beat-up fedora. The director kept to the tradition of making Holmes and Watson's apartment quite messy, and had it decorated with artifacts and scientific objects from the continents they would have visited.[16]
Director Guy Ritchie used the soundtrack from the film The Dark Knight by Hans Zimmer as temporary music during editing. Zimmer was pleased when Ritchie asked him to do the score but told him to do something completely different. Zimmer described his score to Ritchie as the sound of the Pogues joining a Romanian orchestra.[39] For the musical accompaniment, composer Hans Zimmer used a banjo, cimbalom, squeaky violins, and a "broken pub piano". At first Zimmer had his own piano detuned, but found that it sounded out of tune. He asked his assistant to locate a broken piano. The first piano they located was passed over as it obviously had been cared for, but the second one was the one they used in the production. Zimmer said "We rented 20th Century Fox’s underground car park one Sunday and did hideous things to a piano."[40][39]
All music composed by Hans Zimmer.
| Track | Title | Length |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | "Discombobulate" | 2:25 |
| 2. | "Is It Poison, Nanny?" | 2:53 |
| 3. | "I Never Woke Up In Handcuffs Before" | 1:44 |
| 4. | "My Mind Rebels At Stagnation" | 4:31 |
| 5. | "Data, Data, Data" | 2:15 |
| 6. | "He's Killed The Dog Again" | 3:15 |
| 7. | "Marital Sabotage" | 3:44 |
| 8. | "Not In Blood, But In Bond" | 2:13 |
| 9. | "Ah, Putrefaction" | 1:50 |
| 10. | "Panic, Sheer Bloody Panic" | 2:38 |
| 11. | "Psychological Recovery... 6 Months" | 18:18 |
| 12. | "Catatonic" | 6:45 |
The film had its world premiere on December 14, 2009, in London and was subsequently released worldwide on December 25, 2009 (December 26 in the UK and Ireland), after being pushed from a November release date.[3] An advance charity screening was held in select locations in Belgium on December 10, 2009. [42]
The film opened to an estimated $62.4 million in its first weekend, placing in second at the US box office to Avatar, which grossed $75.6 million. The film earned a strong per-theater average of $18,031 from its 3,626 theaters. Its one-day Christmas sales broke records. As of December 25, 2009, Sherlock Holmes had grossed $65,380,000 worldwide making it Guy Ritchie's biggest box-office success yet, [43][44] and the 9th highest grossing film of 2009.
The film has received generally positive reviews from film critics; review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports that 68% of 192 critics have given the film a positive review, with a rating average of 6.1 out of 10.[45] Among Rotten Tomatoes' "Top Critics", which consists of popular and notable critics from the top newspapers, websites, television and radio programs, the film holds an overall approval rating of 53%, based on a sample of 34 reviews. The site's general consensus is that "Guy Ritchie's directorial style might not be quite the best fit for an update on the legendary detective, but Sherlock Holmes benefits from the elementary appeal of a strong performance by Robert Downey, Jr."[46] Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score out of 1–100 reviews from film critics, has a rating score of 57 based on 34 reviews.[47]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three out of four stars and highlighted the film's strong characters, visuals and action-packed plot;[48] the characters were also praised by Jake Tomlinson of Shave Magazine, who believed that Downey Jr. and Law were "perfect together" and that Strong was "a convincing and creepy villain".[49]
A. O. Scott of the New York Times was more reserved: he noted that the director's approach to films was "to make cool movies about cool guys with cool stuff" and that Sherlock Holmes was essentially "a series of poses and stunts" which was "intermittently diverting" at best.[50]
David Stratton was scathing, describing as "a travesty of Conan Doyle and a reprehensible rip-off of one of fiction's great characters". He considered the plot "not Sherlock Holmes territory at all", and though conceding that the film was entertaining said that it had "ridden roughshod over one of literature's greatest creations in the process".[51]
On January 17, 2010, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association announced the winners of the 67th Golden Globe Awards with Robert Downey, Jr. winning Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy for the portrayal of Sherlock Holmes.[52] In addition, the Broadcast Film Critics Association nominated Hans Zimmer for Best Score but lost to Up by Michael Giacchino.[53] The film was nominated for Best Original Score and Best Art Direction at the 82nd Academy Awards.
When Guy Ritchie finished the movie, he discussed a sequel with the production team. Robert Downey, Jr., Jude Law and the other cast members also signed up to a possible sequel. Ritchie has started to write the story and pre-production is set to begin on March 21, 2010.[54]
Sherlock Holmes is due to be released on DVD and Blu-ray/DVD/digital copy combo pack on March 30, 2010 in the United States.[55]
Although Sherlock Holmes takes a number of liberties with the original Holmes stories, it also contains numerous references and allusions to the earlier works. The film quotes the Conan Doyle novels and stories on several occasions, including: "The game is afoot" ("The Abbey Grange," as well as the original source of the phrase, Shakespeare's Henry V); "Because I was looking for it" ("Silver Blaze"); "You have a grand gift for silence, Watson. It makes you quite invaluable as a companion" ("The Man With the Twisted Lip"); "Crime is common, logic is rare" ("The Copper Beeches"); "My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems. Give me work" (The Sign of the Four); "It makes a considerable differerence to me, having someone with me on whom I can thoroughly rely" ("The Boscombe Valley Mystery"); and "Data, data, data—I cannot make bricks without clay" ("The Copper Beeches").
The scene in which Holmes and Watson make a series of deductions from a dead man's watch closely mirrors a similar sequence in The Sign of the Four, in which Holmes uses nearly identical observations (scratches around the watch's keyhole, pawnbroker's marks on the inside of the case) to deduce information from a watch belonging to Watson's late brother. Holmes's passing reference to locking Watson's chequebook in his desk parallels a similar statement in "The Dancing Men," which commentators such as William S. Baring-Gould have taken to mean that Watson had a gambling problem, an interpretation that the film also supports.[56]
Among other references to the earlier stories, Holmes retains the portrait of Irene Adler acquired for his services in "A Scandal in Bohemia." The "V.R." design that Holmes shoots into the wall at Baker Street is mentioned in "The Musgrave Ritual," in which Watson reports that Holmes used a pistol to adorn the wall "with a patriotic V.R. [for Victoria Regina] done in bullet-pocks."[57] The bulldog that appears throughout the movie is first referenced in A Study in Scarlet, in which Watson says "I keep a bull pup." The dog's name, Gladstone, is taken from an episode of The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Although the dog is never mentioned again in the original stories, its treatment in the film recalls the speculations of commentators (as summarized by Baring-Gould) that "the pup was a victim of one of Holmes's chemical experiments...[or] the dog, unable to stand the Baker Street menage, deserted."[58]
A number of the film's details recall "The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone." The first is the name of the primary antagonist, Lord Blackwood, which parallels that of "Mazarin Stone" villain Count Negretto Sylvius (Negretto is Italian for black and Sylvius is Latin for woods). (As Holmes scholar W. W. Roberts notes, this is "presumably a private joke at the expense of Blackwood's Magazine, long and unavailingly courted by [Conan Doyle] in the 1880s."[59]) Another common detail is the Crown Diamond, an alternate name for the Mazarin Stone, which hangs around Irene Adler's neck in the film. "The Mazarin Stone" is also the first story to mention that the 221B Baker Street apartment had multiple exits and a waiting room. The extra exit, which was through the bedroom, is employed by Holmes to follow Irene early in the film.
The scene where Baker Street is first shown is a direct parallel of the opening credits of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
At the end of the film, Adler says to Holmes, "A storm is coming", foreshadowing the planned sequel. This line is similar to His Last Bow's "There's an east wind coming, Watson", said by Holmes at the end, subsequently described as a storm, foreshadowing World War I,[60] and used almost verbatim at the end of Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror.[61]
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Sherlock Holmes is a 2009 film that follows the famous detective and his faithful friend Watson as they go up against the nefarious Lord Blackwood and try to demystify his supposed resurrection, all while handling the distractions of an occult group in London, the infamous Irene Adler, and Watson’s impending marriage to his dear Mary.
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  | Diary: Guy about town - Diary: Guy about town - Showbiz - News - Manchester Evening News |
| | Ritchie and Downey Jr launch new, 'authentic' Sherlock Holmes - Ritchie and Downey Jr launch new, 'authentic' Sherlock Holmes | Film | guardian.co.uk |
| | Is That You, Sherlock? - The New York Times > Log In |
| | Sherlock Holmes: More than elementary - USATODAY Photo Gallery |
| | Warner Bros. gets a clue - Warner Bros. gets a clue - Entertainment News, Film News, Media - Variety |
| | Sherlock Holmes? Ritchie's on the case - Coming attractions: Sherlock Holmes? Ritchie's on the case - USATODAY.com |
| | The Strange Case of Mr Ritchie and the Cursed Movie - The Strange Case of Mr Ritchie and the Cursed Movie | The Sun |Showbiz|Bizarre |
| | Jude Law to star in Sherlock Holmes remake - Jude Law to star in Sherlock Holmes remake - Telegraph |
| | Rachel McAdams, From Canada In My Holmes - Rachel McAdams, In My Holmes - POPWRAP | Gossip | Entertainment | News |
| | New Brunswick actor knocks down star - timestranscript.com - N.B. actor knocks down star | By Yvon Gauvin - Breaking News, New Brunswick, Canada |
| | Law to star in Ritchie's Sherlock - BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Law to star in Ritchie's Sherlock |
| | Robert Downey Jr 'to play Holmes' - BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Robert Downey Jr 'to play Holmes' |
| | Marsan joins 'Sherlock Holmes' cast - Movies - News - Marsan joins 'Sherlock Holmes' cast - Digital Spy |
| | Elementary, my dear Ritchie - IGN: Elementary, My Dear Ritchie |
| | ShoWest First Look at Sherlock Holmes - ShoWest: First Look at Sherlock Holmes - ComingSoon.net |
| | Sherlock Starts Shooting - IGN: Sherlock Starts Shooting |
| | CS on location with Sherlock Holmes - CS On Location with Sherlock Holmes - ComingSoon.net |
| | Guy's Take On London's Gritty Underworld - Guy's Take On London's Gritty Underworld - The Early Show - CBS News |
| | Sherlock Villain Kicks Ass - IGN: Sherlock Villain Kicks Ass |
| | Downey/Law are elementary to new 'Sherlock' - Early look: Downey/Law are elementary to new 'Sherlock' - USATODAY.com |
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