Sherlock Holmes + Taken (2009)
SHERLOCK HOLMES (***) - Dir. Guy Ritchie
Finally, a featherweight piece of Hollywood trash that knows better than to scramble its story or its visuals. The result is a fun confection. The movie begins with Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey Jr., great) feeling bored because he thinks he understands everything. Then along comes a villain who appears to know magic and cannot die (Mark Strong, playing Aleister Crowley crossed with the leather and haircut of a Nazi). If “Sherlock Holmes” is about science vs. superstition, science is clearly favored, but only if we cure our arrogance with wonder and a respect for the universe’s mysteries. I would be happier if the procedural elements were more clear - scene changes, character introductions, clues, deductions - but maybe that’s because I wanted something Ritchie made subtle to be more obvious for me. Holmes and Watson (Jude Law XOXO) have a lot of fun being gay in all but name.
TAKEN (**1/2) - Dir. Pierre Morel
Remarkably clear. Act One is a divorced military man (Liam Neeson, great) telling his daughter over and over again not to go to France for vacation. The ex-wife and her beta-male second husband (Famke Jansen and, snicker, Xander Berkeley) want her to go. When the daughter gets to France, she’s kidnapped pretty much right off the plane by swarthy Russian-Arab-Eastern Europeans. In Act Two and Act Three (each a tight 30-minute segment), Neeson goes to Europe and kills everyone, all without uttering a single word of French. Take that, independent women, emasculated men, socialist Europe, brown immigrants, and pacificism! Still, aside from an absence of, you guessed it, subtlety, my only real complaint is that the movie is only PG13 when a revenge fantasy should be an artery-spraying bloodbath. Produced by Luc Besson.