PCCP notes: this was written before any of us discovering that Sherlock Holmes did not hum and ahead of Guy Ritchie appearing on Stars In Their Eyes as Lazarus.
Two friends of mine, both people with a high-enough intellect that means that they can forget about remembering how to breathe and concentrate on the bigger things, both remarked that Guy Ritchie's forthcoming Sherlock Holmes flick looks like it may be, you know, shit.
Chances are they probably won't be the last to suggest that, then it'll probably officially ratified when Chris Moyles says he's looking forward to it. Maybe they were understandably hoodwinked by the film's use of the Robert Downey Jr cloaking device, a seductive bit of kit which has the ability to give any film a veneer of hipster quality. So seductive, that it shielded them from the obvious.
Ritchie got lucky back in '98 with Lock, Stock... , then again with Snatch, when he cannily anglicised the Tarantino tropes, smartly fixing them to the towbar of the British crime film genre while catching the waft from Loaded's laddy reclamation of the Michael Caine wideboy chic. Any time he's tried to do anything since it's gone really impressively, put-a-blue-placque-up-here-to-commemorate-it wrong - Swept Away is a turkey sandwich on December 27th, while critics took turns in seeing who could administer the biggest kicking when he released Revolver. I'll put my hand up, though - I didn't go all Linda Blair during Rocknrolla, just because Ritchie repeated what worked from the early films, plus it at least implied that he may not be taking it all that seriously (casting Peep Show's Matt King, who ripped awesome piss out of him in Star Stories was a neat touch), and that it steamed full-pelt into so-bad-it's-good guilty pleasure territory.
The maths are simple - two years of making films people liked, ten years of piping out shit, combined with a clear inability to display either the ideas or the execution that creep above competence.
Dog bites man isn't news, man bites dog is, goes the phrase - Guy Ritchie makes bad film isn't news, Guy Ritchie makes good film is.
Kick me out of my torpor when he does.
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