The Game's Afoot (It Smells Like One, Anyway)

My good friend whose passion for Sherlock Holmes is a large part of what prompted me to start reading Doyle's complete writings warned me: the recent Hollywood sequel, A Game of Shadows, was terrible. I'd had a lukewarm reaction to the original, where my friend had actually rather liked it. And here he was, telling me that the sequel was atrocious. So it was a pretty easy matter for me to take the film off my list and resolve not to see it.

What I really can't begin to explain to you is what changed. I hit my head and forgot the warning long enough to put the movie in my Netflix queue? I put the movie in the queue before I received the warning and forgot to take it out? I was so enthusiastic for more Holmes that I was even willing to take in the bad stuff? Well, whatever it was, I got the movie and watched it.

And my friend was not wrong. It's pretty terrible.

As if forgetting any of the intelligence and cleverness that made Holmes popular in the first place, this sequel film is focused on blowing up (sometimes literally) all the showy visual aspects of the first film. More slow-motion fight sequences. More mindless action sequences. More everything except actual plot.

The storyline of the film is barely coherent. It has something to do with Moriarty building a criminal plot that for some reason involves a gypsy fortune teller who threatens him, even though she doesn't know why or how. It somehow necessitates getting onto a train and getting shot up, traveling to mainland Europe, stockpiling lots of weaponry (which is used to cause a lot of visually impressive damage in one late sequence), and a disguised assassin? I think. The individual sequences are clear enough, I suppose, but how things connect from A to B to C is... well, non-existent really.

Jared Harris, a fine actor from TV's Mad Men, is wasted in his role as Moriarty. His brand of villainy is too conventional, a personification of the way the film substitutes action for intelligence. It's especially disappointing after the brilliant portrayal of Moriarty in the BBC's modernized take on Sherlock Holmes.

Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law do still make a truly entertaining screen pairing, and yet what that relationship is in this film seems to have morphed from the first film, and bears little resemblance to the Holmes and Watson of the book. Where Doyle's characters each provide motivation to and bring out the best in the other, these two characters squabble and needle each other like an old married couple. Far from indispensable to one another, they act like they can't wait to be rid of each other. What you see on screen between the two of them is more than sometimes fun to watch, but it's pitched like a 19th century buddy cop movie -- a 48 Hours or Rush Hour done well, sure, but not a Sherlock Holmes tale.

Whatever lapse of mine made me forget my friend's review, I certainly paid for it. I now pass that same judgment on to you. I rate the film a D. It was a dreadful mess, made all the worse for the fists full of cash it apparently raked in at the box office.