THESE REVIEWS HAVE SPOILERS, YOU’VE BEEN WARNED!

During the holiday My girlfriend, my brother, and I went and did a create-your-own double feature.  We watched the Imax 3D version of Avatar, then went straight to see Sherlock Holmes.

Avatar is amazingly beautiful.  There are just some really striking colors and really the 3D is the best EVER! All that said, it is one of the dullest stories I can remember in a movie in recent memory.

There is no character growth.  All the characters end being the same as they were when they showed up. This could have been solved easily by braking this movie up, having it be three films.  this space could have been filled with the real reasons that the general hates the natives, or why Giovanni Ribisi’s character always has this goofy face, like he has sympathy but is a slave to the shareholders.

But all of that has already been talked about, to death.  What hasn’t been talked about is the HUGE flaw in the storytelling. (AGAIN SPOILERS)  In the big climatic battle, one of the secondary avatars, (and avatar is an alien body created for a human to have their consciousness transferred to for periods of time.  They are made form human and alien DNA, and they look like the aliens, but have four fingers instead of 3,) is killed in battle.  The avatar’s “driver” awakes in a shack and is then shown lurking outside with a big freaking gun.

This is all well and good, but when the main character ends up back at the shack, in his avatar, battling to big bad general, the dude with the gun is nowhere.  This is the definition of sloppy storytelling.  As Anton Chekhov once said, “if you have a gun in the first act, it better go off by the third act.”

I mean, really, if they just wanted him out of the shack, just show him running away without a gun.

As for Sherlock Holmes, well once I got over the idea that it wasn’t really Sherlock Holmes, I enjoyed myself.

Robert Downey Jr. gives a stellar performance.  He is charming and witty, the banter between him and Jude Law as Watson is fun, and the moments where he breaks down how he is going to beat someone up totally should have been in a batman movie… wait… that is basically…. holy crap… the whole thing is Victorian Batman, and I love Batman.  Well done Guy Ritchie!

Speaking of Guy Ritchie, may I say that I was rather impressed.  I am of the belief that he has only done two movies.  He did Swept Away (which is good in that awful kinda way,) and he did Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels five freakin’ times. I mean really, Snatch is like the same movie (visually).  Holmes though was something new, something fun. It was as if Ritchie added a quality of real fun, not violent fun, into his energetic style, and produced something good.

At the end of the day, I would recommend both of these films.  They are both far from perfect, but they both do a good job of entertaining, which is what you go to movies like these for.

John K