Sherlock Holmes For Morons

It was only a matter of time. A Hollywood-budget-sized, in-all-earnestness, contemporary-sensibilities-pandering excrescence to the deathless Holmes-Watson saga; an adventure set as a Victorian-era action flick for hormonal adolescents and adults whose IQ barely exceeds their belt size, complete with a myriad of action-flick-requisite chases, fisticuffs, shootouts, and things blowing up, and for good measure, some sex, and a villain who's managed to rise from the dead to do his evil deeds.

Early in Sherlock Holmes — and also again, later on — the famous sleuth demonstrates his ratiocinative powers in a way undreamed of by his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle. Observing a thug standing guard over a horrible crime in a dimly lighted church, Holmes calculates just how to surprise the man, disarm him and beat him senseless. The audience follows his thought process though slow-motion pre-enactment, observing how the laws of anatomy and physics will be used to snap bones, gouge organs and turn flesh into pulp. Then, having seen it diagramed once on screen, we see it all again, with more noise, in real time. Elementary!

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It seems that an evil aristocrat ... executed for a series of murders, returns from the dead to mobilize an ancient secret society that he may have time-traveled into a Dan Brown novel to learn about. Doesn’t that sound fascinating? I thought not.

O tempora! O mores!

RTWT here.

Trailer here.