Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes

For our one-year anniversary, we decided to indulge in a drink and “Sherlock Holmes,” (2009) dir. Guy Ritchie. Join us for a celebratory However Improbable cocktail hour and this special case file on a Holmes adaptation without compare! It was Marisa’s first introduction to the Holmes and Watson, and reviewers have described it as either “disturbingly bad” or a “fresh reinvention” of an old classic. Add in some catatonic dogs, resurrected villains, occult secret societies and Rachel McAdams - and Guy Ritchie’s first stab at Sherlock Holmes, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law, is a winner. And it clocks in at 69% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Nice.

This steampunk roller coaster ride of a film raises some interesting questions about how we value adaptations of stories we understand to be enshrined in a literary canon. We talk about its versions of these iconic characters, why it’s mean to bisexuals, what it gets right and wrong about occultism in the Victorian era, and the enduring appeal of queer subtext in blockbusters even when we really should know better.

Music credit: The songs “Denmark (Live)” by the Portland Cello Project is featured with an Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).