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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