- UK release: December 2011
- Director: Guy Ritchie · Writers: Michele Mulroney, Kieran Mulroney
- Studio / distributor: Warner Bros.; Village Roadshow Pictures; Silver Pictures
- Genre: Period action mystery / adventure thriller · Runtime: 129 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- Main cast: Robert Downey Jr (Iron Man, Chaplin) as Sherlock Holmes; Jude Law (The Talented Mr Ripley, Road to Perdition) as Dr John Watson; Jared Harris (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) as Professor Moriarty; Noomi Rapace (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) as Madam Simza Heron; Stephen Fry (Wilde, Gosford Park) as Mycroft Holmes
- IMDb: 7.4 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 59% critics / 77% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
Two years ago Guy Ritchie did something nobody much expected of the man behind Lock, Stock and Snatch: he took Conan Doyle, dunked him in soot and bare-knuckle brawling, and turned out a Holmes that actually worked. The first film was a surprise, a brisk reinvention that traded the deerstalker and the magnifying glass for a Holmes who could read a fight three moves ahead and then win it. The obvious problem with a sequel is that the surprise is spent. What A Game of Shadows does instead is reach for the one thing the original kept in reserve, and let Holmes loose on the only opponent worth the trouble.
The setup
A wave of bombings, assassinations and convenient deaths is rippling across Europe, and Holmes (Robert Downey Jr) has traced every thread back to one hand: Professor Moriarty (Jared Harris), a respected Oxford don whose public reputation is spotless and whose private business is engineering a continental war for profit. With Watson (Jude Law) on the eve of his wedding and very keen to be left out of it, Holmes drags him back into the field anyway, and the chase runs from London to Paris to a German arms works and on towards a peace summit in Switzerland. A Romani fortune-teller, Simza (Noomi Rapace), holds a thread that ties the conspiracy together. The rest is two clever men trying to out-think each other before the fuse runs out.
The cast
Downey is doing the same trick as before and doing it well: a Holmes who is brilliant, vain, half-feral and faintly ridiculous, forever a step ahead of the room and visibly pleased about it. The looser, funnier register suits him, and the disguises and self-sabotage never quite tip into smugness. Law is the steadier pleasure. His Watson is competent, dry and permanently exasperated, and the marriage that ought to break up the partnership instead gives Law more to push against. The two of them bicker like a couple who have been together far too long, and that rapport carries whole stretches of the film.
The real addition is Jared Harris. After a sequel of villain rumours, Moriarty arrives as a soft-spoken, donnish predator who never raises his voice because he never needs to, and the scenes where he and Holmes simply talk, working out each other’s next move over a chessboard, are the best thing here. Noomi Rapace, fresh from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, is given less than she deserves; Simza is functional rather than fully drawn. Stephen Fry turns up as Mycroft to do exactly what Stephen Fry does, with one indecorous touch the certificate had to think about.
The craft
Ritchie’s house style is all over it. The slow-motion fight previsualisation, where Holmes narrates the beating he is about to administer before delivering it, is back and pushed further, and there is a forest chase scored to whistling shells and falling trees that is the most purely kinetic set piece either film has managed. Philippe Rousselot shoots a Europe of brown fog, gaslight and gun-oil, and Hans Zimmer’s score, all clattering gypsy strings and barrel-organ menace, gives the thing a restless forward lean. It is busier than the first film, sometimes to a fault; the camera rarely sits still and the plotting can disappear under the noise. When Ritchie does slow down, for the chess game, for a train-carriage ambush, the control is there. He just enjoys the chaos more.
How it stacks up
This is a sequel that has watched the right films. The globe-trotting structure, the arms-dealer villain pulling Europe towards war, the gadgetry, all of it reads as Bond in a frock coat, and the Reichenbach material draws openly on Doyle’s The Final Problem, the story written to kill Holmes off. Set beside Ritchie’s own first Sherlock Holmes, it is bigger, faster and a touch more cluttered, trading some of the original’s deductive cleanliness for spectacle. Anyone who came to these films wanting the cool puzzle-box pleasure of a proper mystery will find less of it here. Anyone who came for two charismatic leads and a worthy adversary will find more.
Critics versus the rest of us
The critics are lukewarm, parked around 59%, and the complaint is consistent: too much noise, too many set pieces, not enough actual detection. Audiences are warmer at 77%, and the gap tells the story. The reviewers are marking it against the idea of a Holmes mystery; the audience is marking it against an evening out, and on those terms it delivers. The reservation is fair, the verdict too harsh. A film that gives you Downey and Law at full tilt and Jared Harris as the best screen Moriarty in years has earned more goodwill than the headline number allows.
Verdict
I rate the things I want to rewatch, and this is one of them. It is louder and shaggier than the first film, the mystery is thinner, and Rapace is wasted in a role the script never bothers to finish. None of that stops it being enormous fun. The Holmes and Watson double act is sharper than ever, the Moriarty rivalry finally gives the series a centre of gravity, and the craft, when it stops showing off, is genuinely good. It is the kind of confident, handsome, slightly silly adventure that rewards a second look on a wet Sunday. Not quite the equal of the original’s freshness, but the more entertaining sit. 8⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now, in time for Christmas. Best seen on a big screen for the forest chase alone.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: a third film was announced and then spent more than a decade in development limbo, which has only made the Holmes and Moriarty chessboard scenes here look like a high-water mark the series never managed to follow. Jared Harris, then a relative unknown to many viewers, went on to anchor Chernobyl and confirm the quiet authority on display as Moriarty. The film now streams across the usual subscription and rental platforms depending on region, and the pair of Ritchie Holmes films are routinely sold as a set on disc.
BBFC content advice
Rated 12A by the BBFC for moderate violence. The notes below may contain spoilers.
The BBFC release page for this title could not be retrieved at the time of writing, so the detailed Content Advice breakdown (by category) is unavailable. The certificate shown is the film’s BBFC 12A classification. The short consumer advice on record is moderate violence; the film contains frequent action and fight sequences, weapons and explosions, a brief scene of torture, mild bad language and some innuendo.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
