Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

For those who missed it, 2009's Sherlock Holmes ended with a cliffhanger wherein Irene Adler's mysterious employer Professor Moriarty, who was only seen in shadow, stole a radio-trasmitter from the chemical weapon of that film's main villain. Holmes concluded that this enigmatic Moriarty must be planning something big indeed!

So, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows picks up from that by having Moriarty be a well-known scientist of many fields as well as a politician, and having him show his face every five minutes on screen. What's more, his sinister plans never use the radio-transmitter sequelbait.

I dunno, something about this weird disconnect between the setup and the film that it spawned just bothers me.

But anyways, Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law return as Holmes and Watson in A Game of Shadows, which is a very, very, very loose adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Final Problem, also known as "the story Doyle wrote to kill off Sherlock Holmes, since he was tired of writing him", or "the one with Moriarty". It mostly treads on familiar territory, though with every aspect (character quirks, comic relief, action) supercharged. It's very reminiscent of Pirates 2 at times, actually; Jack Sparrow was turned into a human shishkabob, while Sherlock Holmes dresses as a prostitute. You can get a pretty good impression of what the movie is like from its trailers, though the trailers also spoil a lot of the jokes, so I'd advice not watching them.

And speaking of the jokes, most of them missed me. I guess I must either be turning into a grump or developing actual taste, but I don't find the sort of humour most of this film went for funny. The girls one row behind me were rolling on their seats from the hilarity of it, but I'd prefer for the comedy to focus on the characters of Holmes and Watson. Watching Downey and Law play off each other is very satisfying, which just serves to make it more grating when the film goes for lowest-common-denominator humour like the above-mentioned crossdressing and other such things.

The performances on the main leads are as good as in the 2009 picture, which is the main thing that saved the sequel to me. However, I found Jared Harris as Moriarty very dull. He's kind of wicked, but not on the same caricature level of ridiculousness as the rest of the movie, and thus feels out of place. A cartoonish, hammy villain would have worked in the film's advantage, like it did with Davy Jones in Pirates. Also, Stephen Fry plays Mycroft Holmes as an exaggerated version of himself.

The action scenes are pretty good, most of the time. I really liked the use of "Sherlock-vision", though the climax of the film proves that you can take even that too far. The scene ends up being really unintentionally hilarious, and basically turns Sherlock Holmes and James Moriarty into Cameron Vale and Darryl Revok. Aside from that time, though, the action is well planned and executed.

The plot... is just there. It's thin and kind of hole-y, but none of the plot holes are really glaring enough to get in the way of enjoying the film. Don't expect a detective story or mystery out of a movie about the world's greatest detective (outside of Batman, of course), though.

Overall, it's fine. It's a hypercharged version of the first one. If you're into that sort of thing, go see it.