Cinema Notes: Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

It’s so good to see Downey Jr. and Law back in these roles. For Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, director Guy Ritchie has broadened the scope of their adventure, taking Holmes and Watson across France and Germany on a furious chase to stop the insidious Professor James Moriarty from starting a world war. (Ritchie even opens the frame to 2.35:1). Downey Jr. and Law fall back into their perfected roles with aplomb and expand upon their still irresistible chemistry. To confine these characters’ peculiar affections for each other to mere homoerotism would be to unjustly simplify one of the great relationships of literature/cinema. Watching the two verbally and emotionally spar is such great fun. Adding to the wit and whimsy are the ingenious additions of Jared Harris as Professor James Moriarty and Stephen Fry as Mycroft Holmes. And in a subdued but still worthwhile role, Noomi Rapace (the original girl with the dragon tattoo) makes her English Language debut as a knife-throwing gypsy.

I’m a great fan of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories and I will continue to defend Guy Ritchie’s admittedly loud adaptations. This is because I feel that, in many ways, Ritchie has made the most true-to-spirit version the silver screen has yet seen. Consider, for example, his use of slow motion during the fight and action sequences that, with every deliberate bullet or incoming haymaker, gives us a meticulous sense of space and motion. Indulgent to be sure, but the idea behind Ritchie’s use of the technique is sound: he’s simply found an exciting way to visually exploit the Holmesian ethos. For what is first and foremost to any Holmes deduction if not the logical observation of minutia? And while Holmes may not be doing bumps of cocaine off his violin . . . he does drink a glass of embalming fluid in the film.