Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows - review

1/2
10 April 2012

It's so unfair. So mean. Halfway through this film, you get such a dreadful shock. Without any warning whatsoever. One of those sights you can't forget however much you try. A horror that pursues you even in your dreams. Permanent harm, inflicted in a moment.

Even to name it may conjure a vision that you don't want in your head, but here goes: it's Stephen Fry stark naked. Imagine! Or, rather, don't. But you can't stop yourself, can you?

He is playing - more crashingly obvious casting this than rare inspiration - Mycroft, Sherlock Holmes's older brother. It is true that in Conan Doyle's story The Bruce-Partington Plans Mycroft is described as "heavily built and massive" with "a suggestion of uncouth physical inertia in the figure", even as having a "gross body". But Mycroft being a dedicated nudist was not, so far as I can recall, ever Sir Arthur's idea. That this film should have a 12A certificate seems extraordinary in the circumstances, for this scene alone is far more gratuitous than anything in The Human Caterpillar.

The first Sherlock Holmes film directed by Guy Ritchie, Madonna's sacked squeeze who made his name with the execrable gangster flick Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, was a whopping hit.

Released on Christmas Day 2009, it grossed $516 million worldwide. So here's the next slice, more of the same for them as like it. Ritchie has turned these addictive, seductive stories into yet another brainless action franchise, a bit of Bond, a touch of Mission Impossible, a tinge of Pirates of the Caribbean.

In the soon-to-be-released Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, the baddie wants to start nuclear world war. He just does, OK? In Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Professor Moriarty wants to set off world war as well, so that he can profit by selling armaments. To this end, he has been ratcheting up international tension by fomenting anarchist bombings and assassinations. Only one man can stop him...

Robert Downey Jr's Sherlock has real intensity, a volatile, nervy presence that makes him highly watchable, and a kooky, almost scummy look to him too. What he doesn't convincingly convey is Sherlock's cerebral life, the time he spends in repose thinking the problems out. Instead, to convey Holmes's genius, Ritchie has come up with the awful invention, "Holmes-o-vision". When he is about to get into a fight - he's always about to get into a fight - you see speeded-up images of how he calculates the fight will go. When he sizes up a situation, the camera darts around the room in lightning little cuts, because "he sees everything".

Thus a visual equivalent is substituted for his quickness of mind, one that draws on Ritchie's usual directorial style, in which fights are always speeded up and slowed down and replayed, in a series of stutteringly short shots tightly cut together, a mannerism you either like or find bullying, affected and annoying.

As Dr Watson, Jude Law has no trouble playing the straight guy, humbly devoid of the charisma of his master. This time, the homo-erotic subtext is writ large. Resenting Watson's marriage, Holmes hijacks his honeymoon for one last great adventure.

Infiltrating himself in drag onto the happy couple's train, Holmes ends up grappling on the floor with Watson bare-chested wearing lipstick and eyeliner, while ordering him to lie down with him. Later, reluctant to mount a horse, Holmes carries on camping by announcing: "I don't want anything with a mind of its own bobbing around between my legs." He doesn't know what he's missing.

Jared Harris as Moriarty does a ferrety little thing with his lips and teeth that gives a fair clue to his malevolence - not quite Lectery, but still His direct encounters with Holmes are dramatic, though the final tussle is little helped by the lame device of having them play a protracted game of "blitz-chess". And the original Lisbeth Salander, Noomi Rapace, is introduced as a stylishly dressed, fiercely martial gipsy fortune-teller, Sim, who leads Holmes to the heart of Moriarty's fiendish plot. But after an initial fight bouncing off the walls with an athletic Cossack assassin, Sim doesn't really contribute much to proceedings - a shame, for Rapace has a great face.

The film looks good with natty costumes and lavish sets (Greenwich standing in for yucky 1890s London, Chatham Dockyard for a monstrous German munitions factory). If you want a silly, fast-paced action film to help you through the holiday, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows will serve.

It's a travesty, of course - but that very word is meaningless now that we expect more or less every character who interests us to be freely available for our entertainment outside the confines of his or her original creation. Think of going back to respecting those limits - that's what's truly unimaginable.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows
Cert: 12A

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