Should Guy Ritchie Fear Competing "Sherlock Holmes"?

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Should Guy Ritchie Fear Competing "Sherlock Holmes"?

Written by Arya Ponto

Friday, 22 August 2008

When a movie production is handling a material similar to another's, it usually turns into a race to see who gets it out first, as if earlier automatically means better. No exceptions for the upcoming adaptations of Sherlock Holmes, one by Guy Ritchie and the other by Judd Apatow. Neither of them sounds like the ideal way to portray Sherlock, but Ritchie's is moving along faster, ready to start shooting in October. So what is there to be afraid of?

"They don't even have a script yet. We are way ahead," Ritchie told USA Today.

That's great, except, if he's not careful, his version might actually be less recognizable as Sherlock Holmes than a farcical take on the character starring Borat. How could that be? Ritchie's heavily action-oriented version is based on a yet-to-be-published Sherlock Holmes comic book by Lionel Wigram, who pretty much wrote the comic so he could get a movie deal out of it—sadly a common practice among young comic book writers these days. The comic/movie depicts Holmes as more adventurous and "less stuffy" than his usual portrayal, focusing more on Holmes' skills as a brawler and a swordsman. Sure, I remember that Arthur Conan Doyle gave Holmes a background in martial arts in the books, but to turn him into a macho James Bond type? With a mustache? It sounds like Ritchie wants to make Sherlock asskicking, sexy, and a little bit hood. That certainly seems like a bertrayal of the character's core. But it is an updated take, I suppose, with Robert Downey Jr. naming 300 as a comparison in an interview with Premiere:

What drew you to this take on Holmes?
I love the idea of doing a period piece without trying to be too stylized. I loved 300, but I think that that's been capitalized on in other films like that, so I like the idea of doing a period piece where you don't modernize it, you just realize how modern it was. In 1891, it was incredibly modern. And Sherlock Holmes is such a great character to be able to play.

Compared to this, Sacha's Holmes might actually be closer to a classic Sherlock mystery than expected. Screenwriter Etan Cohen (Tropic Thunder) told MTV that even though he's writing a funny dynamic between Sherlock (played by Sacha Baron Cohen) and his trusty Dr. Watson (played by Will Ferrell) he's staying very faithful to the core of Sherlock Holmes as a brilliant solver of impossible murder conundrums, even going as far as studying Victorian-era forensics and adapting parts of Doyle's original stories.

“What’s been exciting is to do a giant comedy but at the same time try to be true to the mechanics of a Sherlock Holmes story like using the Victorian forensics that Conan Doyle used,” Cohen said. “It’s a cool opportunity to write a good mystery that also gets to be a giant comedy. Fortunately a lot of the stories are public domain now. We can actually draw on a lot of the situations and language of many of the original stories.”

Which one do you suppose the public would prefer? A big budget badass Sherlock Holmes action flick kicking butts like a 19th century Iron Man, or a Sherlock Holmes murder mystery that pokes fun at itself for big laughs? Right now, I'm more inclined to lean towards the latter, but I'll wait until I see something from both films to commit to that.

What's with the porn 'stache, though? That ain't Holmes, holmes. Does Guy Ritchie really think that facial hair = badass? I hope we're not going to see Professor Moriarty with tattoos and an eyepatch. Mutton chops are evil enough, thank you very much.