When I was a kid I got a really neat gift. Someone who dug A Study in Scarlet had taken all the evidence described in the story and turned it into a dossier of police files and photographs and physical objects (e.g., a wedding ring in a bag and some poison pills) and so on. The idea was that, if you were presented will all the evidence of the case, perhaps you, like Sherlock Holmes, could put the facts together and solve the murder. I got that as a gift and I thought it was cool-o-rama.
The problem with the new Sherlock Holmes movie, the one with Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law and all of them, is that there is no case to solve. There is never any sense of things coming together. In a good murder mystery you ought to be guessing the whole time who done it and being given false leads and wrong clues and you should feel your mind working on the case, trying to beat Holmes to the solution.
But, obviously the people who wrote/directed this movie are a bunch of mental pipsqueaks who couldn’t put together a good murder mystery if they tried (and it doesn’t appear that they did try); favouring instead to excite us with extended set pieces where lots of things go boom. There is a 30 second bit at the end where Holmes explains to the villain how he figured out the mysterious parts of the mystery, but it's not like anyone in the audience has an honest chance to guess these things because we are never allowed to know the dimensions of the world in which Holmes lives—what is technologically possible and what is not—it's a shame, really, because a movie that actually had a plot and also wicked CGI would really be something. Here, though, the sense of mystery is secondary to the action. If the character were named something other than Holmes then it would probably never occur to anyone that this was a mystery film.
I guess it's okay because I didn’t waste any money on this film, preferring instead to download it "illegally". It is my sincere hope that by watching as many of these bloated budget films on a lap top via a streaming site or via a bittorrent download, I can do my part to drive Hollywood out of business and usher in a world where people make small inexpensive films that have great plots…in fact, I should like to see the film industry go so broke that they can't even afford cameras and the only way that anyone can afford to make a movie is to rent out a hall and then build a bunch of flimsy sets and have people pay a pittance to come and see the actors performing the film live on a kind of elevated platform in front of the audience. They'd be so broke, in fact that instead of having edited cuts between scenes they'd have to just lower a big piece of cloth and then quickly move everything around behind the cloth to set up the next sequence.
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