Thursday 7 March 2013

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows


Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

It’s 1891.  Anarchists bombs are going off all over Europe, aristocrats, business moguls and opium kings alike are being murdered while storm clouds gather on the horizon.  A war, a world war - the first - looks inevitable and only troubled genius and master of disguise Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey Jr), the world’s only consulting detective, suspects a grander game is afoot. 

Holmes sees the design of his fiendish nemesis Professor James Moriarty (Jared Harris), the man he dubs “the Napoleon of crime,” behind the wave of bombings and assassinations and only Gypsy fortune teller Sim (Noomi Rapace) may hold the vital piece of evidence that will allow Holmes and friend and colleague Dr John Watson (Jude Law) to expose the arch-criminal.

The only problem is Watson’s days of adventuring are over; all he wants to do is marry his fiancé Mary (Kelly Reilly), honeymoon in Brighton and live happily ever after.  Moriarty however sees Watson and Mary as necessary collateral damage, dispatching an army of assassins to ruin their honeymoon by murdering them.  Holmes and Watson are forced to embark on one last great adventure to avert a war and save Europe from catastrophe.  But for Holmes and Moriarty destiny awaits them in a climactic confrontation at the Reichenbach Falls…

More or less picking up where the first film left off, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows hits the ground running with an almost Bondian breathless opening in which Holmes saves a crowded auction room from a bomb, flirts with the duplicitous Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams returning, briefly, from the first film) and takes on four of Moriarty’s hired thugs before the Professor himself is introduced in a crowded restaurant where he outsmarts Irene, engineering her murder by poisoning while across town Holmes, awaiting the pleasure of her company for dinner, assumes he’s been stood up.  It’s a bold, frenetic sequence and Adler’s murder is subtle, brutally effective and introduces Moriarty as economically as possible. 

Conan Doyle purists will scoff that the film bears little resemblance to their beloved detective but who cares?  Ritchie isn’t making a pure Sherlock Holmes film here; he’s making a Bond movie, a superhero flick.  In some ways Holmes was the prototype superhero; an independently wealthy (did he ever get paid for a case?), eccentric genius, a crime-fighter with more demons than you can shake a stick at (the disguises, the drug addictions). 

Like the first film, this second installment is an old-fashioned Boy’s Own adventure, the heroes battling indestructible Cossacks, dodging explosions, shooting it out with Moriarty’s private army and tearing around Europe trying to stop a war.  But the joy of the film isn’t the film’s many edge-of-the-seat action sequences or the intricacy of Ritchie’s steampunk Victorian world but the bromance between Holmes and Watson.  Downey JR and Law’s chemistry is electric, each complementing the other’s strengths; Law’s weary straight man just about tempering the excesses of Downey Jr’s arrogant, nakedly raw Holmes, a genius driven by his demons, their rat-a-tat banter illustrating the love and frustration of their relationship.  Harris is chilling and physical imposing as Holmes’ greatest enemy Moriarty, their scenes together tense and controlled, violence bubbling under the surface, Stephen Fry’s gloriously amusing as Holmes’ smarter, older brother Mycroft while McAdam is charming and seductive in her all too brief cameo as Holmes’s former love interest.  Only Noomi Rapace, fresh from her success as The Girl Who Knows How to Use Her IPhone fails to make an impression, lost in her role as a knife-throwing Gypsy fortune teller.  She has little to do and seems to be along simply to act as Holmes and Watson’s beard.

While the emphasis may be on the action rather than the detection, Ritchie’s film goes some way to banishing the spectre of the Beeb’s recent updated take on Holmes (“Quick Holmes, to the App store,”) and enjoys playing around with the Holmesian staples (the mastery of disguise, the Reichanbach) while never pausing long enough to allow the audience to blow holes in the plot.  Bigger, brasher and more fun than the first movie, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows takes itself just seriously enough to satisfy it’s Christmas audience.

David Watson

Director
Guy Ritchie
Cast
Robert Downey Jr, Jude Law, Noomi Rapace, Jared Harris, Stephen Fry, Rachel McAdams, Eddie Marsan, Paul Anderson, Kelly Reilly
Country
USA
Running time
115min
Year
2011
Certificate
12A

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