Let me guess…it turns out that 14 year-old Enola Holmes (Millie Bobby Brown) isn’t just a chip off the old block but in some ways smarter than her significantly older brothers Sherlock (Henry Cavill) and Mycroft (Sam Claflin).
It would appear that Enola Holmes (Netflix, 9.23) is a blending of Barry Levinson‘s Young Sherlock Holmes (’85) and Guy Ritchie‘s Sherlock Holmes (’09) but through a 21st Century female prism, and with the usual injections of arch attitude and ironic popcorn fantasy.
Based on Nancy Springer‘s Enola Holmes Mysteries, and directed by Harry Bradbeer (Fleabag, Killing Eve). Costarring Helena Bonham Carter, Fiona Shaw, Adeel Akhtar, Frances de la Tour, Louis Partridge and Susie Wokoma.
Variety‘s Justin Kroll is reporting that franchise slut RobertDowneyJr. is seriously invested in launching a third Batman Ironman Indiana Holmes flick, a.k.a. Sherlock Holmes 3. Downey, producer Joel Silver (among others) and director Guy Ritchie expected to again pool forces for the same toxic, soul-curdling steampunk stew.
Creative thrills are not the point here, but the dough. 2009’s Sherlock Holmes made $209 million domestic and $524 million worldwide; 2011’s Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows did $186,848,418 domestic, $545.5 million worldwide.
Downey to fans: “The question is how much and for how many more years can I continue to franchise myself out with this stuff? Will I ever do a Tropic Thunder or a Zodiac ever again, or am I just a ka-ching machine? You guys are the key. Or, you know, you need to tell me ‘when.’ Because I can’t stop.”
From David Rooney’s THR Berlin Film Festival review of Bill Condon‘s Mr. Holmes (Roadside, 7.15): “[Pic] represents an agreeably old-fashioned alternative to all the modernized reinventions of Arthur Conan Doyle‘s venerable detective in recent years. Those include the television updates Sherlock and Elementary, with their contemporary attitudes, humor and gadgetry, and the overblown action-comedy film franchise, with its aggressive cartoon gloss on steampunk style.
“Mr. Holmes is a ruminative film of minor-key rewards, driven by an impeccably nuanced performance from McKellen as a solitary 93-year-old man enfeebled by age, yet still canny and even compassionate in ways that surprise and comfort him. Its emotional swell creeps up with a subtlety and grace that will make this Miramax/Roadside Attractions release appeal especially to older audiences.”
Brian Lowry‘s Variety review of Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows says that the upcoming Warner Bros. release “has the significant advantage of featuring Holmes’ preeminent adversary, Professor Moriarty, as played with reptilian charm by Jared Harris. So while director Guy Ritchie‘s excesses and modern concessions — among them a lot of explosions — remain intact, the parts of this second Sherlock Holmes are considerably more rewarding
“For purists, of course, there’s almost certainly too much gunplay and noise (including Hans Zimmer‘s bombastic score), but this is a Holmes designed to appeal as much to the Transformers generation as those steeped in his literary or even past cinematic exploits.”
Tell me how or why Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (Warner Bros., 12.16) is going to be significantly different than the ’09 original. Same arrogant attitude, same steampunk, Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law again, same director (Guy Ritchie), same producer (Joel Silver), etc. No motive to do anything but repeat what worked before.
Posted on 12.27.09: “ Sherlock Holmes is a corporate disease movie — a period put-on concept that reaches out from the screen like a grinning Irish banshee and surrounds you with frigid air and induces a gradual comatose state.
“Actually, forget the banshee. I felt as if I was strapped to a gurney with a plastic tube snaking out from the screen with poison slowly feeding into my arm from an IV drip. I was sinking, dying…going under.
“I hated the film, yes, but mainly myself for having paid money to see it at the godawful Hell Pit known as the Regal Union Square Stadium 14. Myself and my son Dylan, scrunched into the rear row of the front section with an older couple to my left and two women to their left who were sick and tired of my coming and going (especially the final time). And I didn’t blame them.
“There’s one aspect that deserves favor. Robert Downey, Jr. has assembled a Holmes personality apparently based on his own personal situation as he made the film — a bright and gifted fellow who’s ‘not there’ in a kind of Dylanesque sense, and therefore has a certain something or other that holds the tiller steady. A certain fuck-all integrity? Determination? A willingness to succumb to corporate corruption?
“I only know that Downey has figured out a way of ‘being’ in this godawful film that holds together on some level, and that in place of exuding anything real or substantial (and what actor would attempt this under these ridiculous circumstances?) Downey ambles through with a kind of rock-solid aloofitude that…well, kind of works.
“Which is to say a kind of attitude dance in which he’s a 40ish fellow who goes ‘eewhh, eewhh’ and ‘doop-poop-pee-doop’ and ‘who, me?’ no matter what happens or who says what or what deathly dull villain with brownish or missing teeth is threatening him. He’s playing dry, bent, whimsical, unperturbed. He’s never been more boring, and it was the only way he could have gone, given the stakes and the salary and the bullshit levels.
“And Jude Law, as Holmes’ soul mate, minder and platonic lover Watson, is playing admonishing, dryly perturbed and always patient. And away they go down the muddy London lane. Enjoy their fey verbal ping-pong or not, but if you don’t (and I didn’t, not really) then you’re dead and so is the movie. Because there’s nothing else to hold onto. Well-dressed demonic evildoers…I’m sorry, did somebody say ‘well-dressed demonic evildoers’? The mucky 19th Century period atmosphere is all skank and slime and dust and splinters and squalor — I’m putting myself to sleep just remembering what it was like.
“I can’t remember any reviews that have commented on Philippe Rousselot‘s desaturated-color cinematography. It’s awfully murky and dark — seriously underlit, I mean — and quite oppressive for that. Maybe the brightness levels (i.e., foot lamberts) in the Regal projector showing the film had been deliberately turned down. Theatre chains do this, I know. All I know is that I was muttering to myself, ‘This godawful thing doesn’t even look good…I can’t even cruise along on the craft of it, for God’s sake.”
“This isn’t Wild Wild West, but it’s a similar kind of travesty.”
An HE correspondent says he’s been “getting reports from theatre managers that many people are choosing to see Sherlock Holmes only after finding Avatar to be sold out.” How would Holmes be doing on its own, without the Avatar feed-through? I wonder. Avatar pays off — Holmes is a burn.
In Paul Byrne‘s 12.24 review of Guy Ritchie‘s Sherlock Holmes,which he calls “a travesty,” he says the following: (a) “Robert Downey, Jr.’s accent is ‘flawless,’ according to Ritchie, which either means he’s deaf or I’m the Prince of Wales,” and (b) “This is Holmes the romp — overplayed, overwritten and overwrought, a Sherlock for the age of the easily distracted.”
Jude Law, Robert Downey, Jr.
Hollywood & Fine’s Marshall Finesays, “There are plenty of reasons to dislike Guy Ritchie’s post-modern take on Sherlock Holmes, but here’s the main one:
“Unlike most heroes of American detective literature (Nero Wolfe being the rare exception), Arthur Conan Doyle‘s storied detective is not and never has been an action hero. Not that he’s averse to a bit of rough-and-tumble in the name of self-defense — but Conan Doyle’s stories are singularly devoted to his creation’s remarkable deductive skills, not his ability to outfight giants or outrun fireballs.
“If Ritchie, an intriguing film stylist, and producer Joel Silver (whose ham-handed fingerprints are all over this film) wanted to make a James Bond film set in Victorian times, why call him Sherlock Holmes?
“Elementary, dear reader: Because this is a shameless bid at transforming Holmes and partner Dr. Watson (Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law) into a franchise, a tentpole – and all of that other Hollywood jargon that means ‘a character who can be relied upon to make more than $100 million per film at the box office for years to come.’ Harry Potter films won’t last forever, but Holmes could be the gift that keeps on giving.”
“Guy Ritchie‘s hyperbolic Sherlock Holmes isn’t a movie — it’s a franchise,” writes New Yorker critic David Denby. “Or, at least, a would-be franchise. Arthur Conan Doyle‘s material has been grabbed by its velvet collar and thrown into twenty-first-century media culture. Such a turn was inevitable. The subdued charm of Conan Doyle’s hansom cabs, enveloping fogs and courteous manners, in which the facade of gentility is broken up so delightfully by devilish conspiracies, is not of our age.”
In other words, ladies and gentleman: Sherlock Holmes: The Coarsening and Degradation of Civilization As Your Fathers and Grandfathers Once Knew It.
“In Ritchie’s version, the facade doesn’t even exist: his London is rubbled and mucky, with beggars underfoot, and fouled by half-finished industrial monstrosities. Ritchie’s visual style, aided by the cinematographer Philippe Rousselot, is graphic-novel Victoriana: there are steampunk interiors — ironworks and infernal machines with a retrofuturistic look — and dim laboratories in which everything looks rank. The movie is grimly overproduced and exhausting, an irritating, preposterous, but fitfully enjoyable work, in which every element has been inflated.”
You want some real tracking excitement? Take a look at these Sherlock Holmes numbers. Particularly how total awareness and definite interest numbers are very strong across the board in all sectors. The weakest demo are under-25 females, but even they seem fairly enthusiastic with a 41 definite interest with over-25 females showing a 46 definite interest. Compare that to Avatar‘s 30 for under-25 female definite interest and 31 for over-25 definite interest. Women are interested in Avatar, but they’re significantly more interested in Holmes at this stage.
The Playlist‘s Rodrigo Perez has posted a riff and some links about an alleged homoerotic subcurrent in Guy Ritchie‘s Sherlock Holmes. It feels like a dicey presumption, but there’s at least a possibility that Holmes could knock Humpday off the bromance pedestal.
“The dreaded ‘bromance’ term has been brought up several times in discussions surrounding Guy Ritchie‘s action tentpole, Sherlock Holmes,” he begins. “But even more explicit — much to the chagrin of producer Joel Silver, to be sure — are claims from the actors in the film itself, who not so subtly have already suggest the ‘gay’ word in referencing the very-tight relationship between Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) and his trusty sidekick Watson (Jude Law) Not an appellation you probably want associated with a blockbuster.
“Sherlock star Rachel McAdams has already said the film is, ‘kind of the love story, actually. I play supposedly Sherlock’s love interest, but it’s really Watson.”
“In [a] recent interview in USA Today, Jude said the homo-erotic overtones, filthy language, and bare-knuckle fighting are ‘quintessential parts’ of the Sherlock Holmes film (sounds like quite the rollick indeed).
“Or at least that’s how a lot of gay-friendly sites are positioning his quotes, and it’s not the first time. Put in ‘gay’ and ‘Sherlock Holmes’ in Google and you will get plenty of responses. It’s as if the gay community wants to adopt the film as there own.
“And hey, there’s nothing wrong with that at all, and the filmmakers are probably wry enough to acknowledge this too. But Silver and the studio? Hmm…”
Borys Kit‘s 3.26 story about Summit Entertainment buying film rights to William Kalush and Larry Sloman‘s “The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero” invites mockery, as Summit intends to do the same thing with Harry Houdini that Joel Silver and Guy Ritchie are doing with Sherlock Holmes in their upcoming film, which is to turn him into a generic bullshit superhero with washboard abs.
The operative portion of Kit’s story says that “the studio is not looking to make a biopic but rather an action thriller featuring a character who is part Indiana Jones and part Sherlock Holmes. Summit hopes to cash in on worldwide recognition of Houdini’s name while potentially launching a franchise.”
Summit is into the idea because Kalush and Sloman’s book claims that Houdini “acted as a spy for Britain and was asked to be an adviser to Czar Nicholas II’s court in prerevolutionary Russia.”
Indications are that the spy angle is, at best, a nugget. Amazon reviewer John Coxacknowledges that in 1902/3 Houdini sent “reports” from Germany and Russia back to Superintendent William Melville of Scotland Yard (who was then head of what could be considered British Intelligence). Does this mean Houdini was a spy, or just a letter writer who felt compelled to report what he was seeing to his friend in London?
Kalush and Sloman “do make some interesting connections back to America and the shenanigans with Houdini’s passport application,” says Cox, “but it’s all very speculative.”
I studied Harry Houdini extensively during the preparation and writing of a 30-page report, written for producer Ray Stark in 1989, about the viability of several Houdini scripts that Stark had optioned or bought. The bottom line with Houdini was that he was always a romantic eager-beaver who saw himself as a dramatic figure, and his letters to Melville, I believed (and still believe), were more about Houdini’s love of being involved in the espionage hurly burly of the day…nothing more.
Yesterday evening a Hollywood Reporterstory, written by Stuart Kemp and sourcing Warner Bros. execs, refuted a report in London’s Sun that the studio had asked director Guy Ritchie to reshoot parts of Sherlock Holmes.
Damn straight. If I was running Warner Bros. production I wouldn’t dream of telling Ritchie to re-shoot Sherlock Homie — it’s perfect as is! A kickboxing James Bondian Holmes with a totally buff bod. Maybe he’ll have the ability to fly or at least leap like a tiger and run up walls like the martial-arts guys do. Maybe he’ll be able to deliver a blow so powerful he can send villains crashing through brick walls. None of that tweedy-ass Basil Rathbone stuff, no deerstalker hat or Inverness overcoat….balls to the wall!