#Sherlock holmes a game of shadows movie

And he's very funny when called on to join a posse, revealing a lifelong aversion to horses ('dangerous at both ends and crafty in the middle'). Half the time his Holmes seems bent on keeping himself amused as much as anyone, tippling on embalming fluid or chowing down hedgehog goulash at a gipsy encampment.

A Game of Shadows only becomes enjoyable when it pauses the plot and gives the stage to its performers, or rather, performer: Downey Jr sports with the role like a jazz musician noodling in and out of a tune. What those montages actually convey is Ritchie and his editor whooping it up in post-production. But there is no plausible sense of mental ingenuity here, just as there is no real clue-hunting. The action set-pieces, tending to overkill, are no more satisfying than the whippy montages of deduction meant to evoke the brilliant mind of Holmes, racing to its own speedfreak beat. It is karaoke Sherlock, barely related to the original, yet not without a sense of fun. This is product designed for a cinema public raised on video games, slo-mo violence and the genial narcissism of the modern star. I'm not sure Conan Doyle would recognise his creation as revived in A Game of Shadows, though it's not his ghost the film sets out to please.

#Sherlock holmes a game of shadows movie

Ritchie, perhaps feeling vindicated by his 2009 triumph, has swapped the five writers on the first movie for husband-and-wife team Michele and Kieran Mulroney, but aside from that it's the same again. How quickly it has established its own mood and tempo. It also made this sequel an inevitability.

Audiences apparently couldn't get enough of Robert Downey Jr's steampunk version of the Baker Street detective, no matter the preposterous anachronisms and nonsensical plotting the film felt at liberty to indulge. Arguments about Guy Ritchie's trivialisation of Sherlock Holmes two years ago were rendered more or less irrelevant when the film вЂ“ surprisingly вЂ“ made over $500m at the box office.