Movie review in the Friday, Dec. 16 Oregonian....
Did you enjoy the first Robert Downey Jr. "Sherlock Holmes" movie for what it was? More precisely: Did you enjoy it as a middlebrow, semi-steampunk, semi-forgettable buddy-cop action comedy that happened to star hawt bromance variations on Holmes and Watson -- with some nice nods to Holmes lore, a ramshackle Hans Zimmer score, a couple of clever action edits and a nice coat of bohemian grime courtesy of director Guy Ritchie?
Well, then you'll probably enjoy "Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows." You might even find it an improvement as far as the villain is concerned.
"Game of Shadows" cherry-picks a few details from Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes story "The Final Problem," inasmuch as the film features Holmes squaring off against his intellectual equal: the math-genius "Napoleon of Crime" Professor James Moriarty (relatively underplayed by "Mad Men"'s Jared Harris). A bedraggled and manic Holmes (Downey) disrupts Watson's (Jude Law's) nuptials -- dragging the annoyed sidekick into an investigation of Moriarty-backed bombings. A Romani woman (Noomi Rapace), her missing brother, Holmes' brother Mycroft (Stephen Fry), and a remarkable variety of projectile weapons are rolled into a mystery that threatens to spark a world war.
The sequel has all the merits and demerits of its predecessor, only with a less-snarly antagonist, a more thoughtful final showdown and broader Holmes/Watson relationship jokes. (Law and Downey remain a lot of fun to watch together; the leads' chemistry covers a lot of silliness.) The filmmakers continue to distill Holmes' intelligence to hyper-edited sequences in which he predicts how he's going to punch people, and Ritchie continues to demonstrate a knack for staging oddball action beats, particularly during an artillery-filled chase through a forest.
The best and smartest 21st-century Holmes/Watson team is still Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman (if you aren't watching the BBC's modern-day "Sherlock," do yourself a favor) -- but Downey/Law's "Lethal Weapon"-ish variation is still plowing its odd patch of soil with modest success.
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(129 min., rated PG-13) Grade: B-minus
'Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows' (The Oregonian, Friday, Dec. 16, 2011)
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