Movie Review: Sherlock Holmes, A Game of Shadows

My darling wife had four days off in a row.  While I much prefer these days to the ones in which she works, they do involve me doing a trifle more work myself (three meals a day instead of one, etc.).  Also, while our home is the sort of place you would be very happy to find yourself while on vacation, even a vacation home is very much the same after a while.  Therefore, last night we went to the Movie Tavern, ate dinner and watched a film.

The idea of the Movie Tavern I first encountered in Portland.  Basically a few seats in a theater are taken out, replaced with small tables or shelves, and you get to eat pizza, or some other unhealthy delicacy and drink beer while watching a film.  It is an excellent idea.  My first experience was at the Bagdad, Willy Wonka, pizza and McMenamin's beer.  It was a substantial reason why I moved to Portland as I figured that any place where such an event could take place was a good place.

The film we watched was Sherlock Holmes:  A Game of Shadows.  One of the reasons why I am reviewing this film is I am interested in the contrast between my take and my friend Dade, who also watched the film and reviewed it. 

We expected this to be a silly, fun film, that required little intellectual or emotional investment.  Our expectations were met.  I also had steeled myself to attempt to completely ignore the concept of it being a Sherlock Holmes film as I was raised on Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes rather than Robert Downey Jr..  The Sherlock Holmes I knew was a detective who used deductive, logical reasoning to solve crimes rather than leap to the obvious, emotional conclusion.  The films were rather slow paced, full of dialogue, and while a gun may have been fired Sherlock Holmes never broke into a run.  From the trailers I knew that this film would be quite different and I wished to not have my pre-conceptions of the character destroy the film.  I was not entirely able to do so.

I'll start with a basic summary, not of the plot because the plot is essentially irrelevant.  Well, alright, here's the plot.  There's a bad guy, with a vast bad plan, who must be stopped.  Sherlock Holmes is the only one who can stop him.  Shenanigans across Europe ensue.  This film is not really a detective story.  It does not give you the opportunity to work out what has happened and try to predict what will happen in advance.  There aren't clues for the audience, and the bad guys are identified as soon as they are introduced.  No, this is super-hero movie.

Sherlock Holmes is a super-hero.  He can essentially see into the future and the past of a place simply by noticing everything.  This isn't the deductive reasoning of a detective, this is an intuitive, superhuman skill.  The movie is also an action film.  Sherlock Holmes engages in multiple kung fu flick action fights in the film which require an intense amount of the suspension of disbelief.  Sherlock Holmes can also withstand vast amounts of physical punishment and still ride a tiny pony from Paris to Switzerland in a day or two.  The pace of the film is unrelenting, either there is action or there is humor, and the action is really a lot of action, and the humor really is quite funny.  The action has the modern penchant for extreme speed (I find myself too old to even keep up with what is happening, it's just a blur) interspersed with slow motion sections for the really good bits.  Personally I prefer Sean Connery as James Bond simply punching or shooting someone, but you certainly cannot look away from this sort of stuff.

The humor essentially is the funny guy and the straight man, Sherlock Holmes is wacky, Dr. Watson is a straight man, and other than the magnificent cameo of Steven Fry that's about it.  Still, it is well delivered and of a good variety, there are chuckles aplenty in the film.

The sets and costume were clearly historically accurate, even with the liberal use of CGI, but the scale and lighting were definitely big-budget, epic story.  There is very little sense of intimacy in the film.  The views are high tracking shots of recognizable landmarks, viewed on a clear day.  There is no rain, little cloud, none of the smog of victorian cities, the populace are clean and healthy.  This is not the brooding shadows of a victorian detective story.

To sum up, this is a ridiculousbut fun film of the modern super-hero genre.  It is grand in scale, small on plot and character, full of action to the point of being almost beyond the abilities of middle-aged humanity to comprehend, and witty.  It is exactly what most people go to the cinema to view: larger than life personalities with larger than life abilities, fighting evil along with friends and sidekicks, cracking jokes along the way.

Within this genre I somewhat preferred the recently released Captain America, The First Avenger.

This is no Sherlock Holmes.