Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
DIRECTED BY GUY RITCHIE
Confusing intricacy with stylized incoherence, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows puts the “steampunk” into “steaming pile of convolution.” And if that doesn’t quite make sense, neither does the film.
Granted, its basic premise is straightforward enough: Robert Downey Jr.’s decadent detective must foil Professor James Moriarty (Jared Harris), who is fomenting political violence across Europe with the aim of prematurely provoking the First World War. Moriarty’s motive is the hefty profit he’s poised to derive from his deviously acquired holdings in companies that would cater to the combatants, supplying everything from bullets to bandages. The problem is that screenwriters Kieran and Michele Mulroney proceed to overstuff their plot with ill-conceived diversions, which are only exacerbated by Guy Ritchie’s directorial excess.
2009’s enjoyable Sherlock Holmes re-imagined Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Victorian sleuth as a manic, bare-knuckled man of action, able to employ his powers of deduction to instantly size up his opponents and predict their patterns of attack. This time, those powers are amplified to the point of outright clairvoyance, and Ritchie seizes every available opportunity to flaunt them. Here, Holmes can not only think ten punches ahead, but can presciently (and preposterously) sabotage a group of soldiers by replacing a round of ammunition with a purpose-built explosive device disguised as a tube of lipstick—or so it appeared. In truth, Ritchie’s method of presenting Holmes’ split-second calculations as a barrage of speed-ramped shots often has the effect of obscuring, rather than clarifying, exactly what Holmes is meant to be up to.
Meanwhile, quite why those soldiers were dispatched to kill Dr. Watson (Jude Law, returning) and his new bride on their honeymoon is just as unclear, as is why a massive explosion leaves the corpses at its epicentre entirely intact (other than because it conveniently allows Holmes to collect a telltale piece of evidence from one of the bodies). A Game of Shadows is full of such lapses of logic, which would be a problem for most films, but is particularly egregious for a picture based, however loosely, on one of literature’s most iconic logicians.
Were the film funnier, or Ritchie’s staging less slapdash, A Game of Shadows‘ narrative failings might be more forgivable. Instead, we’re offered prosaic attempts at homoerotic humour and superfluous, uninspired slow-motion—elements intended to further spice up the fanciful 19th-century setting, but that succeed only in leaving this sequel feeling almost as stale as it is nonsensical.