Brief Movie Review

I saw the Sherlock Holmes movie last week, and it was pretty good. I just wish they'd left out a couple of characters who served exactly no purpose except to make the story excessively busy. They have a perfectly serviceable A plot (the occult murderer) and a wonderful B plot (Watson's impending marriage and the resulting stress on the two investigators' relationship). That was all they needed. Including not one but two characters from the literature, each of whom deserves to have a plot revolve around them, and then relegating them to irrelevance is just tacky.

Also, Holmes' exquisitely realized cerebral-predictive fighting was a set-up without a payoff. It's a great way to demonstrate some things about the character, but it's just there, not doing anything, and certainly not being worth the screen time spent on it, except as an unsatisfying and empty spectacle. It's a comparatively minor nitpick, but it's such a great gimmick I'm disappointed they didn't do more with it. It doesn't even show up in the situations you'd think Holmes would most want to use it, which is confusing to me.

The story is serviceable, but not special. The rest varies between solid and awesome. It was also very well previewed, so if you've seen the trailer, you know whether or not you'll enjoy this.