Pop Culture Blog Post: Why "Sherlock Holmes" is the Ultimate Guy Ritchie Movie

The old joke among snobby film geeks is that flashy, bratty British film director Guy Ritchie has been making the same movie, over and over again.

Well, one, this isn't really true, especially when you factor in the oddball, borderline incomprehensible Kabala-influenced meta-thriller "Revolver" (which I still maintain has some of the best stand-alone Guy Ritchie sequences in his entire career) and his god awful remake of "Swept Away" (the less said about THAT folly the better, although I'll admit that musical number is a bit of a guilty pleasure – shhhhh).

But if we're taking this joke as having more truth than irrelevance, which it probably does, then "Sherlock Holmes," his steam punk-y riff on the Arthur Conan Doyle super sleuth (out on DVD and glorious Blu-ray this Tuesday), is his ultimate movie. It's the distillation of many of the themes that made his other movies so popular and compelling, in a new, more maturely laid out way. It stands to say that it's also his best, most accomplished work too.

And a wicked amount of fun, too.

In previous Guy Ritchie romps, most notably the three that make up his key body of work ("Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels," "Snatch," and "RockNRolla"), the central characters, a swirling nest of colorful underworld goons with names like Turkish and One Two, are scrambling after some object – always a very old, very English object. In "Lock, Stock…" it was a pair of antique firearms, in "Snatch" a fist-sized diamond, and in "RockNRolla" a hypnotically powerful painting.

A lot of Ritchie's subtext (yes, there is some) deals with nationalism. The characters' (and indeed the movies') very British-ness is always of chief concern to the director. This is reflected in the objects that turn the screws too. While the diamond and painting are never exclusively described as British, they are at the very least rich with British symbolism, and inherently connected to the British Royal Crown (jewels, naturally, and old paintings that hang in aristocratic halls).
In "Sherlock Holmes," a darkly witty contraption that was glossed over by most critics because of its Hollywood movie sheen, he's able to set an entire movie inside one of these heirlooms that his modern day thugs are always squabbling over. There's a reason that he lingers so longingly at the construction of Tower Bridge (and why the climactic battle is set there) – it's an epic symbol of England. And freed of hundreds of years of distance, Ritchie has a field day.

Ritchie loves thieves, clearly, which is probably one of the reasons that Adler, played here by a cracking Rachel McAdams, was elevated from a minor character in Doyle's novels to a central figure here. Her purity at heart goes a long way with another key thematic strand of Ritchie's work, which is: we're all thieves, mate. We steal. We steal money, jobs, hearts; we lie, cheat, deceive. The only difference between someone like Adler, with her peacock tuft of period dress, and the criminals Holmes chases down on a regular basis is that the street thieves are more true to themselves in ways that many of us are not or cannot.

Also, Ritchie is one of the great urban directors. And his Victorian London is one of the best ever visualized (for an extremely recent comparison, just give this one a side-by-side to the recent "Wolf Man" remake). Ritchie loves the city. And the sweaty, ugly London in "Sherlock Holmes" directly informs the sweaty, ugly London of, say, "Snatch." The same issues plague London today as then, among them xenophobia, corrupt bureaucracy, class divisions, and secret societies.

It's just that all of this stuff happens underneath and in between a crackerjack mystery involving the occult, Roberty Downey Jr. and Jude Law flirting with each other and villainous character actor Mark Strong wearing the greatest fucking leather jacket in the history of cinema.

As far as Guy Ritchie movies go? "Sherlock Holmes" is the ultimate.