Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

I've been trying for several weeks now to figure out what to say about Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. (I hate titles with colons. Don't you? Makes me feel like I'm back in college, reading academic articles.) Anyway, what can I say about this movie? Well, it was very good. It was very well made, artistic, technically sound. It was suspenseful and exciting and it kept my interest throughout. There were moments of great humor. Robert Downey Jr. was magnificent in the lead, as was Jude Law in the number two slot. In short, it was a very good movie and I'd gladly see it again. In fact, I'm seriously considering purchasing both this movie and its predecessor. I just have one niggling little problem with Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. It's not Sherlock Holmes! Let's be blunt about this. Sherlock Holmes was not - I repeat, NOT - and action figure. He didn't go in for fisticuffs, and he especially didn't engage in modern martial arts style kickboxing. Sherlock Holmes was an intellectual detective. He solved crimes not by racing about, fighting, shooting and that sort of thing. In quite a few of his cases, in fact, he scarcely leaves his smokey rooms. Instead, he holes up and ponders the case, sending his Baker Street Irregulars all over the city looking for clues, firing off telegrams to gain information. For Sherlock Holmes, it was always a game of the mind.

So who was a good Sherlock Holmes? Well, Basil Rathbone did a serviceable job in the fourteen Homes films shot in the 1940s, but Rathbone is such a cold fish that it's hard to be sympathetic with his character the way you can be with Downey's. And Nigel Bruce's Watson was a bumbling idiot who couldn't tell which end of the gun the bullet came out of, not anything like Law's passionate, hard-fighting, pistol-wielding Watson. The best Holmes - at least to my mind that is - was Jeremy Bret, a consummate actor who literally made the character his own. Bret's Holmes was intense, cerebral, yet he possessed a compassion for those who were the victims of crimes. When he would pontificate at length on the quality of a piece of paper or a bit of tobacco, you knew you were seeing a master at work, a man who devoted himself to his craft to the exclusion of everything else. And he scarcely needed to use his fists or a gun, because he could talk most criminals into giving themselves up to him peacefully.

But back to our new Holmes. As I say, Downey gives a superb performance as this new, fast-talking, fast-acting Holmes, and there's nothing wrong with that, I guess. Young people today, having been raised on music videos, action films and video games, want a faster-paced, wittier Sherlock Holmes, and Downey and Ritchie give them just that. And Law's Watson is, I suppose, a character more in keeping with someone who was both a doctor and a soldier. And I will give kudos to the set design. Watching A Game of Shadows, you truly get the feeling you are in Victorian England, with its mix of incredible wealth and extreme poverty, luxury and filth, high society and working classes. There's dirt and mud and horse droppings. Everything seems to be under construction - the buildings, the bridges, the streets, all of the landmarks that we associate with Jolly Olde England. And there is a lot of action and gunfire - including one very big gun - and racing about on horseback and people getting thrown off of trains, and all that sort of thing. As I said - the film kept me riveted. I highly recommend it. But once you've seen A Game of Shadows, go grab a copy of Arthur Conan Doyle's work and find out what the "real" Sherlock Holmes was like. You never know. You may find that you prefer the original.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is rated PG and has a runtime of 129 action-packed minutes.