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.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)

The Hindenburg III glides silently above the streets of Manhattan. I kid you not. It docks at the Empire State Building. A nervous passenger has a package sent on ahead of him. Then the passenger vanishes, and a name is scratched off a list. Meanwhile, over at the Tribune, ace reporter Polly Perkins (Gwynneth Paltrow) gets a cryptic message to meet someone at Radio City Music Hall. She goes and meets an aged scientist who's terrified for his life. He will say only one name - Totenkoff. Before Polly can find out any more, New York is attacked by a horde of giant, flying robots. An immediate call goes out to Sky Captain, aka Joe Sullivan (Jude Law), who flies to the rescue in his own P-40 Flying Tiger. After dispatching several of the behemoths, he flies off to his secret base, where Polly is waiting for him. Seems they once had the thing going on that ended badly. As they are hashing out old times, the base is attacked by bat-shaped aircraft that flap their wings. Joe and Polly fly after them, shoot down several and finally escape by diving into the ocean in Joe's plane which promptly turns into a submarine. By the time they get back to Joe's base, the place has been destroyed and Joe's loyal side kick, Dex (Giovanni Ribisi), has been kidnapped. Polly and Joe, following clues left by Dex, fly to Nepal where they find Shangri La, then head out over the ocean in search of Totenkoff's secret base. When they get there, they find that Totenkoff (the very late Laurence Olivier) has been a very naughty boy indeed, and now the entire world is in danger. Folks, I repeat, I am not making this stuff up. Somebody else already did that for us. And they put it all into a movie called Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

Written and directed by Kerry Conran, Sky Captain is a loving homage to all of the movie serials of the 1930s and 40s - like Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon and The Undersea Kingdom - complete with mad scientists, robotic villains, secret bases, rocket ships and ray guns. The film was shot almost entirely against a blue screen background - only the actors were real, and the scenery and props were all added later digitally. This allowed Conran to create the New York that he wanted to, set in 1939, yet in some strange alternate universe, where the Nazis never came into power and where supersonic aircraft and ray guns were invented. It is a happy, mythical reality that begs us to forget the realities of history as we knew it and come along to a better place. The sub-title the World of Tomorrow is taken from the 1939-40 New York World's Fair, as do the Trylon and Persiphere that they find deep in the Himalayas. In Conran's hands, the World of Tomorrow envisioned in 1939 actually existed and much of the world of then never materialized. Would that it had been the case. The sepia tone of the film lends it an air of nostalgia, and the dim lighting and deep shadows bring to mind the lighting techniques of film noir. Unfortunately, it also lends the film a cartoon-like quality that takes away from its magical realism. Probably the film's most memorable performance is by the late Laurence Olivier. Conran took archival footage of Olivier and digitally manipulated it to speak the words he had in his script. In some sense, we truly are in the world of tomorrow if we can get dead actors to keep right on performing years after their demise.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is not going to be to everyone's liking. It's just too fantastical for some people, who apparently have a difficult time suspending their disbelief long enough to enjoy a good adventure yarn. The acting is a bit formal and stiff, much as it was in those old 30s and 40s serials, but after a while you really don't notice too much. Probably the most difficult part of the film to buy is Joe's airplane, which has the ability to fly at near supersonic speeds over unimaginable distances and, as an added bonus, turn itself into a submarine when needed. My favorite World-of-Tomorrow gadget - if you will - was the giant, hovering aircraft carrier. I've seen something similar in old Mechanix Illustrated magazines from that period. They dreamed of it then. Conran's dreaming of it still. We can too, thanks to his movie.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is rated PG-13, and it is available in sepia-toned color.