On my way out of Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, I overheard a woman telling her friend that it was "the sort of thing you have to see a second time." Presumably she meant the intricate scheme by which "Napoleon of Crime" Moriarty (Jared Harris, suitably menacing) seeks to deliver Europe into an early Great War, a mystery so trite that its solution hinges on whether Holmes (Robert Downey Jr., inching dangerously towards Johnny Depp levels of hackdom) can get a hold of his nemesis's pocketbook. But showing us everything for a second time is very much Ritchie's M.O. There are about twenty minutes of movie in A Game of Shadows, all told: the rest is instant replay, a shameless parade of alternate angles and slow-motion recaps of bullets firing out of barrels or getting jammed in the process. It's as if in lieu of the finished product, Ritchie submitted home footage of his own work in the editing suite, dazzled by Final Cut Pro's array of grey filters and motion blurs.

Serving last time as the drapery behind Downey's outsized star-mugging, the production values are now the franchise's sole raisons d'être. The film is immaculately art-directed, crammed with enough late-Victorian knickknacks to whet the appetite of any steampunk fetishist. Returning DP Philippe Rousselot thankfully brightens things up so we can clearly make out these doodads, trading the murkiness of the first chapter for a sharper palette that better suits the velvet upholstery that follows Holmes everywhere he goes as much as composer Hans Zimmer's Morricone-inflected leitmotif. What does it matter, though, when Holmes is nothing but a bauble himself? So light is Downey's characterization of this supposed genius that there's nothing to grasp onto. Moreover, the film is so poorly plotted by co-screenwriters Kieran and Michele Montgomery that we careen from set-piece to set-piece with nothing to orient us but the vaguest threat of the impending First World War--which, the intrepid viewer might deduce, is going to happen regardless of whether Holmes makes nice with a band of gypsies.

What's worse, Ritchie obviously has no affinity for this material, and even less respect for the genre; he aggressively flattens the revelatory moments for which mystery fans salivate. As Paul Auster's New York Trilogy nicely illustrated, detective stories are always allegories for reading: we admire detectives' interpretive skills and flatter ourselves into thinking we've come along with them at every step. Ritchie, though, seems to hate readers. As before, Holmes's powers of inference--deduction seems not to be his bag--are rendered through incoherent montages that use wonky colour-grading to single out objects he's noticed, so that he might offer a brilliant account of whether someone is about to give him a left or right hook. "What do you see?" Sim asks him at one point, and he replies, "Everything. That is my curse." It's ours, too: Ritchie has saddled us not with a mystery but with a bloated action movie--not with a detective but with an undiagnosed ADD sufferer prone to fistfights. To call it elementary would be generous.-Angelo Muredda

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the critic

Published: December 16, 2011