Okay, I knew attending the opening day of a movie, especially on Christmas Day, might be a little crowded, so I guess showing up at 7:40 PM for the 7:55 PM showing of Sherlock Holmes was probably not my brightest idea. I convinced my wife and my daughter (home from college) to rush over to the theater only to find out that the show was sold out. Instead we got tickets for the 10:05 PM show. We went back home to play a board game for an hour or so, and then returned a half an hour before the show, only to find a very long line of people with tickets in hand. And even then my daughter had to sit in a different part of the theater than my wife and I.

But enough of my poor planning&ellips; let me get to my thoughts on the movie itself. I had just seen Avatar seven days prior and if you read my review of that movie, you will see that I gave it high praise (one of my top five films of all time). So with Avatar still in my thoughts (it was that good), Sherlock Holmes had a lot to live up to. To start with I had mixed feelings before seeing the movie. I really looked forward to seeing the cast of this movie, Robert Downey Jr. (Sherlock Holmes), Jude Law (Watson), and Rachel McAdams (Irene Adler—Holmes' love interest). However, I have not been a big fan of the director Guy Ritchie (Madonna's Ex), who would determine the creative interpretation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famous detective character. So I wasn't sure how this was going to go.

The first thing I had to overcome was the relationship between Holmes and Watson. The traditional interpretation has always been a very strong Holmes character with Watson as a fairly competent, though sometimes bumbling, second banana who provided the blackboard for which Holmes could spell out his discoveries to the audience. In Ritchie's interpretation this is definitely not the case. Ritchie has said that he always felt that Conan Doyle's original intention for his characters had been for a more Butch and Sundance type of equal partnership. This was a somewhat difficult transition and if not for the strong portrayals by Downey and Law I don't think it would have worked, but it does. The constant back-and-forth banter between Holmes and Watson is the highlight of the film for me.

The story line itself is not that hard to follow. As has become common in recent movies about Victorian times (both for settings in England and in the U.S.), or in reflection on those times (as in Dan Brown's DaVinci Code series or in movies like National Treasure), the film is a swat at the Masons, though this portrayal is a little bit more demonic than normal. Lord Blackwood (played by Mark Strong ,recently seen in Body of Lies and End Game) is a master villain who uses a Mason-like organization and ritual superstition along with cutting edge technology to create a mystical façade that cowers the masses and provides the basis for a plan to conquer the world through fear of the unknown. But Holmes fights this with reason and science to expose and defeat the devious plot. This storyline is brought out against a backdrop of shadowy scenery which helps to magnify the depth of evilness that Ritchie wanted to express.

I normally am not a big mystery or detective movie fan, but sometimes it is fun to try to deduce what happened from the clues provided by the characters. Unfortunately, there isn't any opportunity to try and figure out the puzzles with this movie as Holmes uncovers most of the clues as he simultaneously pronounces his reasoning and conclusions.

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