Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes Is Better Than It Has Any Right To Be
Some directors have a filmography that reads like the greatest hits record, featuring nothing but culture-defining blockbusters one after another. Others do one specific thing so well that they become beloved by fans of that subgenre and rarely deviate from their niche. Guy Ritchie is more so the latter than the former, but he's shocked the world before.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories are among the most heavily adapted works in all of literary canon. Safe in the public domain, Holmes has appeared all over TV and film in a thousand different iterations by a thousand different creators. If one were to list every modern director, though, Guy Ritchie would have been one of the last choices to handle the property.
Holmes & Watson Squandered A Great Premise
Guy Ritchie exploded into the world of gangster cinema in 1998 with his feature debut Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. The film introduced the world to Jason Statham, a phenomenon that has yet to die down even today. On top of prompting its star's later ascension to fame, the film is a solid and well-loved black comedy with a hard action edge. Ritchie followed it up with 2000s Snatch, solidifying his niche in the gritty crime comedy world. Though almost every other film he has ever made received, at best, mixed reception, his fans are numerous and extremely devoted. Ritchie understands something about the ethos of the criminal underbelly of London that clicks with his audience, and he's certainly made some decent films in the process. In 2009, late of his middling return to form RocknRolla, Ritchie took over Warner Bros.'s new take on Sherlock Holmes, to the shock of many.
At the time of Guy Ritchie's adaptation, the most recent theatrical Sherlock Holmes
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