The frenzy is actually increased by the device of sudden flashbacks using high-speed editing to explain how the great detective-chessmaster had anticipated, then executed, a succession of clever moves that resulted in the violent triumph we've just witnessed. There is not, however, too much time in this high-octane narrative for the development of character. Naturally, the women don't get their due. Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams), the love of Holmes's life, appears fleetingly. In a major comic coup that makes the audience draw its breath and laugh heartlessly, Holmes throws Watson's wife from a train as it crosses a viaduct at night. Noomi Rapace, the striking heroine from The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, stalks mysteriously through the picture as a fortune teller as if she'd been told to think she's appearing in the gypsy encampment sequence in From Russia With Love. The three Ms – Moriarty, Moran and Mycroft – come out rather better.
The screenwriters, Michele and Kieran Mulroney, have drawn on Conan Doyle's novel The Valley of Fear for Moriarty's character and background, and on the story "The Final Problem" for the film's climactic encounter between Moriarty and Holmes at an anachronistically named "summit conference" beside the Reichenbach Falls. And Jared Harris plays him as a ratty or foxy type, rather different from the gaunt senior undertaker depicted by Sidney Paget in The Strand Magazine. The ex-army marksman turned assassin Colonel Sebastian Moran is a forceful presence as played by Paul Anderson. Stephen Fry has the right portly build and detached manner for Holmes's older brother, the establishment fixer Mycroft (a part in which Christopher Lee was wholly miscast in Billy Wilder's Holmes movie). He is, however, embarrassing when conducting a breakfast-time conversation with Watson's wife while naked, and he introduces an unnecessarily camp element by addressing Holmes as "Sherly", presumably a reference to the famous "and stop calling me Shirley" joke in Airplane!. Hans Zimmer's melodramatic score incorporates arias from Mozart's Don Giovanni and a jaunty Morricone theme from Two Mules for Sister Sara.
Watching this movie, I was constantly thinking of my friend and colleague, the brilliant wit, critic, novelist, translator and pasticheur Gilbert Adair, who died 10 days ago. Especially his postmodern trilogy of parodic detective stories which conclude at a Sherlock Holmes conference in Meiringen, where Adair himself plunges into the Reichenbach Falls with his own central character. Adair calls non-canonical Watson narratives "Schlock Holmes", but the final book in his series, And Then There Was No One, contains the best Holmes pastiche ever written, a 30-page re-creation of The Giant Rat of Sumatra, a tale referred to by Watson in "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire" and called "a story for which the world is not yet prepared". I must declare a slight personal interest here, as there's a pretentious movie critic in the book called Philippe Françaix.
2. The Adventure of Red-Headed League: Big movies need minor villains, and there’s none quirkier than the self-appointed Red-Headed League. The villains were a pair of thieves who contrived to invent a special organization for red-headed men, under the guise of defrauding the men who showed up to apply. With a few changes, they could be an actual organization of evil gingers, though that might not play so well in the United Kingdom. It would be just bizarre enough to work, and just inconsequential to allow Holmes to brush them off with relative ease. Jackie Earle Haley could star as the most nefarious red-head!
3. The Five Orange Pips: Similarly speaking, “The Five Orange Pips" finds the Ku Klux Klan terrorizing a local Englishman. In Doyle’s story, the Klan are treated more like a mysterious cult than the historical artifact they’re taught as today. Introducing them as a minor presence would be appropriate for the time period; they’d also automatically register as a villain on account of, y’know, the racism.
4. The Hound of the Baskervilles: This is the granddaddy of all Holmes stories, a full-length novel with the detective’s greatest mystery. It’s a murder story posing as a ghost tale, as Holmes and Watson are called to a small town to investigate some mysterious deaths at the foot of the so-called Hound. With Holmes and Watson weaving their way through tangled family trees and double-talking villagers, they’ve got to deduce whether the Hound is real, which isn’t solved until the story’s climax. It would be a fearsome image on screen, and an excellent source of tension. What’s scarier than a giant ghost dog who eats people?
5. The Adventure of the Speckled Band: This is a fairly conventional mystery -- a death attributed to “the speckled band," which turns out to be a snake after some clever sleuthing. But that revelation only comes after a solid chunk of misdirection and more deaths, and the delivery system -- the snake crawls through a ventilator after being activated by a whistle -- is ingenious enough to work. If you want to visualize a death on screen, they don’t get more jarring than an adder leaping out of a vent onto someone’s throat.
6. The Sign of the Four: Robert Downey Jr.’s had his fair share of trouble with substance abuse, which is why some eagle-eyed pundits pointed to Tony Stark’s alcoholism as a bit of meta-casting on Marvel’s part. That issue might rear its head in “Iron Man 3," or it might not. But Sherlock Holmes is also an addict -- in the original stories, he’s quite verbal about his love of cocaine, which wasn’t quite a universally maligned drug in the 19th century. In “The Sign of the Four," Doyle addresses Holmes’ drug problem quite explicitly as he tries to foil a nefarious plot involving the Indian Rebellion of 1857, stolen treasure, and secret agreements up the wazoo. The movies have completely abandoned Holmes’ addiction, but a third movie might hint at his increasing mania in slightly darker terms than just, “Oh, that Holmes, he so wacky." Of course, that might be a step too serious for these generally light-hearted adaptations. The basic plot of “Four" would serve just as well as the backbone for a third movie, without getting into heady territory.
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