Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

Synopsis: It is 1881 and super-detective Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey Jr) and his partner Dr. Watson (Jude Law) are locked in battle with the villainous Professor James Moriarty (Jared Harris) who is trying to engineer a European war.

A few weeks ago I suggested that Moneyball and The Ides of March were two sides of the same coin. Well now I’d like to suggest that Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (SH2) and Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (MI4) are the same side of another coin. Behind their similarly structured names, both are action adventure thrillers with a twist of comedy, trading on the reputation of a couple of well-loved  pop cultural identities – a 60s television series and a 19th century crime buster. They both string together a series of highly kinetic action set pieces that defy all probability as the intrepid protagonist and his indefatigable helpers tackle an evil genius and his inexhaustible supply of henchmen. Both are technically highly proficient big budget studio productions, yet, and admitting that I’m not a big fan of this kind of multiplex fare, I found MI4 engaging and SH2 hollow. Here is why….
 
As MI4 opens with a set piece in which Tom Cruise escapes from an Eastern Bloc prison by fighting his way through a wall of rioting meatheads, SH2 opens with Robert Downey Jr. going toe to toe with 4 armed East End thugs. Needless to say both men emerge victorious but here’s the rub. Both films manifestly conform to the genre device of an attention-grabbing, scene-setting opening.  Guy Ritchie’s treatment.of his Victorian stoush utilizes fight choreography, cinematography and rapid editing techniques that come from the same bag of tricks that animator Brad Bird uses in MI4 (he also introduces a device which he repeats regularly through the film of stopping the action, playing it in slo-mo then replaying it in standard time). But what suits a story set in the present day is incongruous when portraying events 120 years ago. For Ritchie verisimilitude is never an issue
but this anomaly, to which I’m sure his target demographic would be oblivious, is what kept me in observation mode throughout.

A good deal of ink was spilled in 2009 over whether Ritchie with his trademark kinetic style and the constitutionally cocky Robert Downey Jr as his leading man was going to travesty the Conan Doyle brand. The critical consensus was, I think, that Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes was a “re-invention” for the 21st century. Not a completely implausible argument and the film was a critical and commercial success but the problem is that with this sequel (and we are set up for more to come) Ritchie is returning, not to the original text or its conventional legacy of screen incarnations (most famous of which are the Basil Rathbone films of the 1940s), but to his own film. This is not the case with MI4 in which a new director was assigned to the project. What this means is that we get more of the same only amped up with bigger budget. I wasn’t greatly swayed by the first film but here I found Ritchie’s emboldened hand stifling of any dramatic credibility.

This brings me to the second main point of difference between SH2 and MI4, and that is the characterisations and characterological dynamics. One of the features that made MI4 so effective is that despite the completely far-fetched nature of their caper, the characters all carried human baggage and brought to the plot qualities and vulnerabilities that invited us to engage with their adventure despite its “impossibility”. On the other hand Downey and Law, just as they did in the first film, buddy up and wise-crack their way through the escalating violence like a couple of cartoon characters oblivious to all physical and emotional plausibility.  A new character is introduced in the form of a gypsy, Simza (Noomi Rapace), but given the close dependency between the pair she her charms are wasted. Of the only people who might have (both were in the earlier film), Holmes' lady friend Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams) is dispensed with early in the piece whilst Watson’s betrothed (Kelly Reilly) is thrown off a train by Sherlock (kitted up in Some Like It Hot-style drag, not surprising as  his brother played by Stephen Fry calls him Shirley, oh the pop cultural homo-eroticism of it all!!) only to return at the film’s end.

Although Ritchie’s characteristically laddish flash and brash manner has been enhanced by top drawer creative input including cinematography by Philippe Rousselot and music by Hans Zimmer, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is really no more than well-turned 21st century gimmicry foisted onto a 19th century icon.

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