Sherlock Holmes (2011) Reviews

• Excruciating!

  Captain_Roberts2014-12-28

  Finally, a Sherlock Holmes film so bad that it surpasses Sherlock Holmes and the Shadow Watchers for being, most probably, the worst Sherlock Holmes film ever made. The cast is laughably bad. The film is 77 minutes long and, from their wooden deliveries, the cast (collectively) do not seem to have studied their lines even that long. In addition, Sherlock Holmes makes a number of observations that are just...wrong. The audience knows it, but Sherlock Holmes doesn't. Seriously, a man cutting off fingers using pruning shears does not equal someone using surgical precision and having medical experience. It get's worse. There is a moment where a man is at a table with a woman who a person comments on possibly being his daughter. Yeah, she is NOT a young trophy piece, she looks to be the same age as him (not young) and has the acting ability of a wet paper bag. Her "luxurious" home? Obviously a small apartment. Their nighttime rendezvous? Daylight is streaming in through the window. There are a number of glaring errors (apartments that are obviously hotel rooms - complete with emergency exit info on the door and key card locks for example), and they serve to further diminish an already bad film. But that isn't the most frustrating part. The frustrating part is that, with some serious editing of stilted dialogue, a cast that could act, and a budget, this could have been a decent movie. It is often said that a great actor can overcome a bad script, sadly, the reverse is not true. A shining script cannot overcome a turd of a cast. There is a lot of potential here. Writer David Wallace has only written one produced script and, perhaps the horror of what his script became turned him off of trying again. One cannot say. However, there were good ideas in there, but the script needed work. A few more passes and some fixes and this would've been a very different movie. This is a movie so bad that, twenty minutes in, we called it quits. It was so bad that it wasn't even "funny" bad. It was just lazy, sloppy, poorly acted, and had the cinematography of a 4 year old with a cell phone. Hell, the only cinematic gaffe we didn't see was a crew member caught on camera. Skip this stinker.

• This is as bad as a Holmes adaptation gets

  Leofwine_draca2017-02-28

  SHERLOCK HOLMES is a useful film. Useful in so far as you can use it as a measuring stick by which to rate the other screen adaptations of Conan Doyle's famous detectives. If the Basil Rathbone movies and the Jeremy Brett TV series are the finest adaptations ever crafted, 2011's SHERLOCK HOLMES is undoubtedly the worst, far surpassing anything else even remotely bad. It makes the cheesy Asylum film look good by comparison. The reason? It's an amateur film made by a guy who thinks possession of a video camera is the only skill you need to write and shoot a movie. It's set in contemporary America and Holmes is American for no particular reason. The actor thinks playing Holmes merely consists of intoning his lines in a flat way, staring off into the distance, and constantly smoking a pipe. The less said about Watson the better. This film was apparently made in just a few days, which is obvious to anyone watching; it's as bad as it gets, worse than an amateur theatrics production, a simply mindless and awful creation.