Film adaptations of classic books take all kinds of crap, but holy shit, this movie must have been hard to get right. On one hand you have the hardcore fans who will pick up on all the film’s modern touches and hate it. Then there’s the all-powerful but fairly stupid audience, whose favor you must court if you want a $50 million opening weekend. Guy Ritchie chose the second group, and I think he was right.A faithful adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes novels would have been the crappiest movie ever made.

Why do I say that? It’s because you can only cling to the past at the expense of the present. Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns was a borderline flop, and do you want to know why? It’s because the character isn’t interesting anymore. These days we have Spider-Man and Batman, superheroes with weaknesses and flaws and vulnerabilities, and they are far more interesting than some bland, square-jawed Aryan muscleman who can lift up the whole world if the plot requires him to.

In that spirit, the movie takes all kinds of liberties with Sherlock Holmes. He’s been transformed into a trendy quasi-hipster with incredible fighting abilities and a languid watching-the-world-through-glass attitude that one normally associates with stoned college students. He’s incredibly smart, able to construct chains of events in his head and establish connections instantly. Socially, he’s a disaster, but it isn’t due to ineptness. You get the feeling that he could be charming, but he doesn’t think people are worth his time.

Watson has been upgraded from “bumbling sidekick” to “smart, evenheaded man who resents how the eccentric hero keeps screwing up his life”. Irene Adler is your token female lead, and Lord Blackwood is too fucking cool for words. Every time he appears on screen, you smile, because you know you’re about to get your money’s worth. There’s a few others like a enormous foreigner who exchanges bilingual banter with Holmes in between trying to kill him.

I didn’t like the ending much. Without spoiling it, it’s like hearing an amazing classical composition and then realising out it was programmed by computers. It’s still the same song, but it just seems smaller now. Oh yeah, and there’s we’ve also got the cheapest attempt ever at bankrolling a sequel. That’s fine, I just hope future movies don’t go the Pirates of the Carribean route, trying to cram hundreds and hundreds of characters from the books on to the screen just because they can. The plots in these movies should be complex. The casts should be simple.