Holmes packs an exaggerated punch

Sitting in the Great Escape theatre for my own personal premier of Sherlock Holmes, I mentally prepared myself what I expected to be an intellectually challenging film. What I received was not what I was expecting.

The movie quickly proved that it was to be classified as an action film, which is not so close to the novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  I suppose with Robert Downey Jr. posing as Sherlock, I shouldn’t have expected anything more, but I still had my moment of wishful thinking.

Doyle’s original works tended to leave the reader lost up until the last possible moment, where the mystery would then be revealed.  At that moment Sherlock would reveal his observations and the solution to the mystery. In the recent film by Warner Bros. Pictures the real mystery was the location of the mystery.

The film was full of action and a fast paced (but not so puzzling) sequence of events. The main similarity between book and movie was the character of Holmes himself.

Downey Jr. plays an excellent Sherlock Holmes throughout the entire movie. The persona he took brought the original character to the big screen in a very realistic manner. The downside is the fighting side of Holmes in the movie.

In the novels, Holmes would stay away from a fight, but in the new film, he analyzes his opponents and strikes them down with ease.  It is a pleasing twist but almost too much of an exaggeration from the novels by Doyle.