I went to see the latest Sherlock Holmes film last week, and since I have a shiny new blog, I might as well post a shiny new review. :) Overall, I thought the film was great.
While the first Sherlock Holmes film in this sort-of reboot of the series (starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law) featured them chasing a mysterious, sorceror-like enemy across London, A Game of Shadows (AGoS) is much larger in scale and introduces renowned Holmes nemesis Moriarty (Jared Harris) into the mix. The film leaps straight in to the action with Holmes (Downey Jr) trying to figure out what Moriarty's grand scheme is and to try and stop him. He is joined in his adventures by the newly-wed Watson (Law), and it sees the pair travel across Europe, to places like Paris and Switzerland, in their investigation in to Moriarty. And their adventure is by no means a quiet affair, and the action in the film starts early. Holmes and Watson receive help along their quest by Holmes' older brother Mycroft (Stephen Fry) who is a genius like Sherlock but lacks his passion for adventure and insteads assists the British government, and a gypsy woman called Sim (Noomi Rapace) who is inextricably linked to the whole affair. For fans of the first film, we do also see Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams) once again, but she is not a central player in this installment unfortunately.
The visuals in the film are great, and considering that this is a more action packed installment in what will hopefully turn into a trilogy of Sherlock Holmes films, that is a good thing. There is a great many explosion within the film and I don't remember ever feeling that the CGI wasn't up to scratch. One of the quirky, interesting effects in the first film, was when the action would slow down dramatically (either during a fight or some other action-packed, dramatic scene), and it was obvious to me that the filmakers knew those moments were a success in the last film and threw them in to action sequences willy nilly. There's a scene about halfway/two-thirds during the film, when the Holmes, Watson and Sim are running through a forest to escape the baddies, and the entire thing is in slow-mo and the fancy shots used just felt far too over the top to me. While I did, and still do, quite like the slow-mo effect, in this instance I did find myself thinking that they should just speed it up and get on with it now. The entire sequence is slow-mo, and I feel like only parts of it, or just the middle part maybe, needed to be.
Another unique part I found good and amusing from the first film was when Holmes would pretty much predict how a fight would go and how his opponent would interact, and essentially explain what he was going to do and how he would counter-act it to the audience so we could see precisely what he'd done, before the full thing was then played at regular speed. It was good, because it showed Holmes' genius intellect and predictive powers, and it let you catch things that you would miss in the otherwise fast action sequence. This also makes a return in AGoS but once again I felt like it became a bit over-used as it came up several times during the film and lost it's impact, but that might just have been because we'd seen it before and it was inevitable. Still, it was used several times. Having said that, it is mixed up a little bit this time around. For example, in the first instance of this slow-mo-Holmes-narrative, he fully plots out how a fight will go, but when it gets to the sped-up bit where he goes to put it all into action, it is interrupted early on by the intervention of Sim, which was nice as it shows that it was just Holmes interpretation of how things would go and that he hadn't accounted for Sim's participation, and was also quite amusing. Without wanting to give too much of the story away, this effect is also changed up again towards the film's climax, in a tense showdown between Holmes and Moriarty.
The music in the film was once again superb, retaining several of the main themes and motifs from the first film and re-using and remixing them for this film.
Storywise, AGoS felt weaker than the first film. In the first film, there was a lot more mystery and intellectual/mental tension and intrigue. Like I said earlier, this is much more an action film, and I felt that some of the 'puzzles' as it were fell a bit flat and the overall story wasn't entirely well thought out. For example, the motivation of one or two of the characters, and why they did certain things or how they did certain things or acted in a certain way, those kinds of aspects didn't seem to fully fleshed out to me. I don't want to give away important storyline points for anyone who hasn't seen it, so I can't go into much detail here, but I did feel a bit confused as to why some things happened, and the reasons why certain people were involved seemed very forced and not well thought out. Also, we see Irene Adler early on in the film, which was a welcome addition as I loved her and her character in the first film, but for reasons I won't specify she is taken out of the action for the rest of the film fairly early on, and I felt the way this happened was quite poor and rushed, and I did half expect her to reappear later on in the film and was disappointed when she didn't. I can only hope that she will return in a third film if one is made. I also felt that Moriarty's overall goal seemed somewhat obvious, and not quite as devious as I had expected. I was kinda hoping that it would eventually turn out to be something different to what we thought or turn out to be a bit more evil, but it wasn't. And I felt he was a little too-easily defeated. Moriarty does prove himself to be a good villian however, and he is clearly quite cold and calculating and pushes Holmes and Watson to their limits in this deadly game.
Overall, I thought Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows was a great film, very enjoyable (and it was nice to stare at Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law for a couple of hours), and while I felt that some story aspects weren't particularly well thought out and effects were over-used, and it felt a bit like Sherlock Holmes going from one action sequence to another and the story was a just a way for the filmakers to explain why they were using this particular action sequence (at times, not all the way through), I overall thought it was a good film. Not quite the mental workout I would tend to expect from Sherlock Holmes, it was good none-the-less, and was only marginally worse from the excellent Sherlock Holmes. A good film, very enjoyable.
4/5
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