We went to watch Sherlock Holmes last Monday. Very entertaining, providing you leave your brain behind, which is a perfectly fine way to watch a film that doesn't take itself seriously. I liked the incarnation of Holmes - it makes sense to me that a guy who has such incredible deductive abilities is much more likely to be a little crazed than the placid detective from previous versions. I liked Jude Law's Watson too, his backstory justifying why a doctor was also such a man of action.

There's loads of touches in this movie that I liked. The slow motion scenes where Holmes plots his next move in fights, and the explosion scene were great, with the slo-mo actually serving a purpose, and allowing us to see all the details we would have missed. There's great moments of humour as well. To take just one, I was really amused by Holmes and Adler trying to dearm the weapon whilst Watson carried on fighting in the background before being launched across the room in a Family Guy-esque moment. I also loved how Holmes was a terrible locksmith, or more specifically, I loved how this was underplayed and never directly pointed out.

Because, for all those moments, Guy Ritchie is not a man who deals well in subtlty, and sometimes, it all gets a bit much. There's moment where adversity is piled on top of more adversity to the point where you struggle to really care about any one problem. It feels too long at the climax, which is a direct result of Ritchie's overblown style. The Watson-Holmes relationship used the obvious device of them talking like an old married couple, which, whilst funny, wasn't really done particularly artfully. By the end, I was even a little tired of Holmes' many quirks and abilities, which is annoying because he had the potential to reach unparalleled levels of awesome. Basically, at times, I wanted to grab this movie and say 'Stop it'.

Movies watched this year: 4