28
Popular Culture Review
very parallel would contribute to the film’s popularity. Further, Holmes has been
reduced to a fighting machine with the uncanny, even inhuman ability to
mentally compute how he is going to destroy his opponent before actually doing
so. The most probable source for this addition to the character of the new
Holmes is likely a computer-game hero who (I suspect there are numbers of
them) mentally calculates destroying his opponent before actually doing so. To
give Ritchie a bit of credit here, he may also have in mind the convention
according to which the ancient epic hero announces how he is going to destroy
his opponent before actually doing so. Beyond this, Holmes-the-fightingmachine is shed of those elements that once established him as a somewhat
snobbish member of the British upper-class—an obvious attempt on Ritchie’s
part to remove any social barriers separating protagonist from audience.
Carrying on in the back room of a beer hall, Holmes has becomes a bare-fisted
brawler whose brilliant barbarity would make him the envy of any selfrespecting cage fighter.
A deconstruction of the entire film reveals at least two things. First, the
film’s story is roughly constructed according to the guidelines applied in
discussing most any short story: exposition, complication, climax, and
denouement. Secondly, it is not the conflict between Holmes and Blackwood
that moves the film forward. What moves this film forward is spectacle after
spectacle: Holmes and Watson fighting off Blackwood’s thugs in order to rescue
the first female victim; Holmes’ crawling around his flat in a drug and/or
alcohol-induced stupor; Watson’s fiancee throwing wine into the face of a
Holmes who lacks the sensitivity of his original; Holmes waking up to find
himself nude and handcuffed to the bed, his private parts covered by a pillow;
Holmes’ beating his opponent senseless in the pit-fighting scene; and Holmes’
finally defeating the villainous Blackwood while fighting on the steel girders of
the new London bridge.
To be fair, we must commend Guy Ritchie for keeping some elements from
Doyle’s detective fiction. For instance, the bunch from Scotland Yard remain
somewhat inept—or, at the very least, very dependent upon the super-sleuth to
solve their most difficult cases. Again, by the film’s end, Holmes has completely
disproved the supernatural. (Recall, for an instant, Doyle’s The Hound of the
Baskervilles in which Holmes disproves all supernatural explanations as he
solves a bizarre case.) In Ritchie’s version, Holmes uses his intellectual powers
to prove that a very natural explanation exists to account for Blackwood’s
fulfillment of his promise that, on the third day following his execution, he
would rise from the dead and reveal himself as the supernatural equivalent of
Jesus Christ. Other similarities linking the film with Doyle’s original are minor
but somewhat significant: Holmes’ use of drugs; Holmes’ unending fascination
with science; the presence of Mrs. Hudson; the late nineteenth century London
setting; a bored and depressed Holmes firing bullets in the wall of his flat; and
the presence of Irene Adler, who is reduced from a villainous female who is
more than a match for Holmes to a helpless heroine whom Holmes must rescue