Christmas Movie Reviews: “Sherlock Holmes” and “Dr. Parnassus” Both Disappoint (but in Different Ways!)

Two new movies open today: Sherlock Holmes (in wide release) and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (in Los Angeles and New York), the film Heath Ledger was working on when he died.

Let’s look at each in turn:

Robert Downey Jr. as Sherlock Holmes and Jude Law as Dr. Watson

Sherlock Holmes

Let’s get one thing clear from the start: there is nothing gay about the new movie adaptation of Sherlock Holmes.

Earlier this year, star Robert Downey Jr. made headlines when he was quoted as saying the movie was about "two men who happen to be roommates, wrestle a lot and share a bed. It's bad-ass."

Cue the predictable conservative outrage from film critic Michael Medved and the idiots on talk radio.

But now that the movie is opening, other critics are chiming in on that meme, seeing some sort of gay subtext between Holmes (Downey Jr.), and his faithful companion, Dr. Watson (Jude Law). And then Downey stirred things up again when he recently appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman.

I have no idea what kind of crack these critics (and Downey Jr.) are smoking, but I’m already very tired of this weird 2009 meme that says that whenever there are two male friends together on screen, that means they must be gay.

Yes, Holmes and Watson have a sort of "bromance"-type relationship, and Holmes resents the fact that Watson is moving out of their shared lodging to get married.

But if that’s “gay,” I’m Casanova. Grow up already — for God's sake, both the characters have major heterosexual love interests!

So what of the movie itself? It’s not terrible, and to its credit, it’s not quite the Sherlock-Holmes-as-action-hero movie that the previews promised (and that I feared). The scenes where Holmes goes all Matrix, taking down bad guys with his knowledge of physiology, are ridiculous and distracting, but they’re a small part of the movie.

Holmes is still Holmes, using all manner of detail to draw sweeping (and mostly accurate) conclusions about the people he encounters. The scene where he tells Watson’s fiancée far more than she wants to know about herself is clever and effective.

But I found it to be a cheat when the central mystery itself is eventually “explained” in such a far-fetched away; I think one of the great joys of the mystery genre is the possibility that you could figure it all out in advance. If nothing else, it makes perfect sense in retrospect, and we kick ourselves for not seeing it sooner.

That’s absolutely not the case here. The mystery — which it seems to me is the whole point of Sherlock Holmes! — is mere boilerplate.

Law brings some charm and humor to the frequently exasperated Watson, but I found Downey’s performance to be too method actor-y, quirky and brooding, to be very engaging. Meanwhile, I never came close to buying that Downey's love interest, played by Rachel McAdams, is half as smart as she's supposed to be.

And the villain is completely by-the-numbers, clearly just a place-holder until we move on to the “real” villain who the movie hints will be central in the next installment of this would-be movie franchise.

As I said, the movie is by no means terrible. But it's also not as much fun as it could have been.

Next page! Heath Ledger's last film!