“They’re dangerous at both ends and… crafty in the middle.”
Two years ago I walked into a film featuring one of the most iconic detective characters ever made with a fair amount of skepticisms. This year (or technically last year) we were given the sequel, thanks to tons of box office success of the first, and the question I always tend to ask is “did we need this?”. I’m not going to go on for more than a few more sentences boring you with why this question barely applies to a film of this nature, but really does it? This, while it felt like much more initially, is a franchise action adventure film and nothing more. The only problem with that is while, when they do hit it good, it may feel fun at first the more we revisit the same amalgam of fun algorithms all it does is break down that illusion of fun and show how shallow the film really is.
Sadly this is not that sequel. It is not the sequel where everything you loved about the first comes around to bite you in the ass and just let you know that you were wrong. The relationship between Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) and Dr. Watson (Jude Law) is just as give and take as before; and when you add in the tension of Holmes having to take Watson away from his honeymoon with his very recently married wife – Mrs. Watson (Kelly Reilly) – then you know you’re going to have a lot of fun little verbal battles between the two.
What really makes this sequel, and is what makes any sequel like this, are the new characters introduced. From Prof. James Moriarty (Jared Harris), a much more menacing villain than our last who is able to challenge Holmes on every level, to Mycroft Holmes (Stephen Fry), the even more eccentric lesser known brother to Sherlock, we have a lot of new character to chew threw rather than just watching our favourites find new reasons to mock each others’ accessories.
Where this rule of new characters in A Game of Shadows is completely lost is with the introduction of Madam Simza (Noomi Rapace) which ends up being a pretty useless character that never has anything interesting about her other than the fact that she’s a gypsy, and gypsies are always fun-ish, and that she’s a plot point to the entire story of Moriarty’s plan that not even Holmes quite understands just yet. This maybe just another example of screenwriters not being very giving to female supporting characters, which was also evident in the first iteration with Rachel McAdams, who has a short-lived very plot driven purpose as a character in this chapter of Holmes & Watson also.
Otherwise everything else remains just the same as the first. Holmes and Watson get into antics across the world chasing after Moriarty finding clues that never mean anything until Holmes tells us what they mean an hour later in the movie when we’re given a climax. The only thing this movie lacks is a form of explanation to the audience as to how this mystery is being unfolded by our protagonists. The clues seem to unique and lacking indication of where they all fit and never quite make sense until the very end making the detective scenes more like “look at Sherlock being cooky” scenes, which isn’t a bad thing, just not really a good detective film.