Gotta say, I like “Haymaker” Sherlock Holmes a lot better than “17 different brands of Afghan tobacco” Sherlock Holmes. Which do you suppose better befits Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s vision?
We’ve given up the parlor version of detective story, haven’t we? No more gathering the dozen-or-so suspects in a room, making them sweat it out while the killer is revealed in theatrical staging and god-awful overacting. Good. That never made much sense to me, anyway. Just how civil are you English, anyway? Even the murderers among you come to a conclusion along the lines of,” no, no, don’t flee the scene. That’s indecorous!”
Robert Downey Jr. is Sherlock Holmes again. Good for him. More disguises (the sillier, the better), more fistfights, more stop-motion and more foreplay with Doctor Watson (Jude Law). Controversy happens early when Watson insists upon getting married to somebody other than Sherlock Holmes! Hey Jude, don’t make it bad. Guy Ritchie and Robert Downey both deserve great credit for the reinvention of Sherlock to modern audiences. No, he doesn’t seem to detect much anymore. Or, strike that, he detects behind the scenes and tells us about it, but this version of Holmes always has something interesting to say. I haven’t been this kind of riveted to what the lead spouts since Bruce Campbell in Army of Darkness.
Oh yeah, a plot. Well … that’s the downer of the Holmes reinvention. Plot is an artificial construct in the world of Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows – it exists to be either manipulated or circumvented and thus we have less real plot than scenes of how Sherlock is playing the game. He shows up in various places for various reasons, but the plot itself seems to exist outside the movie.
One key part of the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes is less detection and more tactician. Holmes is constantly two steps ahead of the audience. When it works, it’s great. Watching to slo-mo preview reel of an upcoming fight is fascinating. I kinda wish they’d do that in martial arts films 
when I can’t exactly tell what happened when. When it’s bad, it’s bad. Like when Sherlock guesses wrong on the location of a bomb; he switches gears mid-stream where the rest of us were still trying to figure out what led him to the poor first assumption.
I can’t help feeling that this Holmes is also a bit of a sadist, masochist or both. In a scene on a train, he anticipates action so clearly and cleverly that when Holmes, during a firefight, tosses Watson’s new bride off a train, over a bridge and into a lake (to safety), his brother Mycroft is on the spot in a row boat waiting for her. Never mind that kind of anticipation isn’t humanly possible. The greater question in my mind is if you can anticipate the events on the train so far in advance that you can place your brother at the spot where a woman will not plunge to her death, why can’t you just envision the scenario by which you don’t have to push her off the train at all?
And for that matter, um, you know who the bad guy is, how he does his evil, what he’s capable of, and how helpless the authorities are. Why not just kill Moriarty? It’s not like you lack access to him or tools to do the job effectively. Or maybe you can’t imagine a way to get away with it. Hmmmmm.
Rated PG-13, 129 Minutes
D: Guy Ritchie
W: Michele Mulroney & Kieran Mulroney
Genre: Classics reinvention
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Fans of steampunk
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: The confused
Movies like this one fall into the category of “fan fiction,” where the point isn’t recreating an author’s vision, but instead a kind of storytelling shorthand–borrowing the clever characters and their relationships, already well-known to viewers, so the movie makers don’t have to bother with all that character development crap and can focus on explosions and hair’s-breadth escapes.
I’ll definitely see this movie–I quite like explosions and escapes–but to my mind the re-invention of the Sherlock Holmes world that works best is the recent BBC series “Sherlock.” Better world, better characters, and–wait for it–a plot.
And explosions.
I’m a fan of the “Sherlock” of which you speak as was immediately reminded of such after seeing Benedict Cumberbatch (if that is indeed his real name) last night at Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. If wish more episodes would come our way.