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What

Sherlock Holmes – A Game of Shadows, film review

When

January 2012

Where

At cinemas UK wide

The Review

Director Guy Ritchie has trundled out Robert Downey Jr as Sherlock Holmes and Jude Law as Dr John Watson in a new feature film - Sherlock Holmes – A Game of Shadows – that brings Holmes cheek-to-cheek with his fraternally naked brother Mycroft (played by Stephen Fry) and face-to-face with his sociopathic nemesis Professor James Moriarty (played by Jared Harris).

This incarnation of Sherlock Holmes shares little with the character created by the author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

In A Game of Shadows, Sherlock is one (small) part cerebral, one part superhero, one part action man, one part James Bond, one part am-dram-thespian, one part comedian, one part drag queen, one part street-fighter, one part one-man army, and one part all-round eccentric figure of fun.

There is little that is new in A Game of Shadows over what was served up in the original Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes film that was released in 2009.

Sherlock is stylishly kooky without being clever or interesting.

Watson plays the part of Robin to Sherlock’s Batman much as before.

Acres of film are given over to slow-motion shots which were tiresome by the end of the first film and which are plain lazy in this.

The plot is sieve-watertight, and the dialogue as meaningful and long-lasting as a soap bubble.

The CGI is CG-why, and the sight of a naked Stephen Fry performing a pastiched amalgam of his Blackadder characters does little to enhance the film.

A Game of Shadows is pure fluff. Fluff for the sake of fluff. A couple of loud bangs, a puff of smoke, some jaunty one-liners, some silly charades, and a film that you’ll forget before you’ve pulled the duvet up to your chin.

There’s absolutely nothing to recommend A Game of Shadows as a film other than to say that it is, at best, a transient diversion on an otherwise cold and wet January evening.

It is artifice, not art.

Does it need to be anything more than that?

Sherlock Holmes – A Game of Shadows review rating

2 Stars

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