Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

Be warned: there are spoilers. Here's the first one...it's a terrible, terrible movie. I mean, sure, it zips along nicely when you're in the theater, dazed by the caramel-thick butter-flavored-lipid fumes wafting over from the next row, where some kid has taken the sucker plunge for the Super Giant Combo and spent a car payment on a tub of popcorn bigger than a Cooper Mini that contains maybe sixteen cents worth of ingredients. There are some funny moments. There are some one liners. And there are explosions.

Ye ghods, there are explosions. There are pointless explosions. There are bullet time explosions. There are curiously shaped explosions that devastate massive buildings but don't do more than scratch the people caught in the middle of them. But that's all right, because when you look at the Sherlock Holmes canon, what defines it more than anything, really, is explosions. I mean, in "The Adventure of the Dancing Men", shit blew up real good. And "Hound of the Baskervilles" wouldn't be remembered at all today if it weren't for fact that the titular hound had double back-mounted mortars with autotargeting. 

I know, I know. It's a new millennium, and actual "detecting" in your movies about a detective is passe. I realize that there's a case to be made for reinventing and reinterpreting, and I am painfully aware that a painfully faithful adaptation of source material is, well, painful. 

But at the same time, if you're going to adapt a property, it would seem to make sense that you keep some of the elements of that property that made it worth adapting in the first place. The first Sherlock Holmes flick, for all its steampunk goofiness, had at its core a mystery, and it kept Holmes a detective. Game of Shadows, on the other hand, is a picaresque, with Holmes and Watson tumbling from one set piece to another, occasionally with justification. Much is blown up, shot, stabbed with meathooks, or otherwise subjected to rude treatment. Very little is detected.

But what there is, in the movie, is clear evidence of other movies, a weird melding of Michael Bay and Lord of the Rings. Why? Because those movies made money, and yes, they do in fact sneak into Germany by way of Rohan. (And it doesn't help that Reichenbach Falls, as displayed, looks a helluva lot like Minas Tirith). It's jarring and it's unpleasant and it's a clear grab at the lemming-dollars they think are out there, and for all I know, they may be right. Then again, Game of Shadows was attracting business well behind its predecessor, and that's even with the inflated ticket prices of 2011. So maybe playing it safe and cramming a big budget movie with bits of every other movie, lest it accidentally exhibit some originality, doesn't quite work after all.

I'd say more, but really, what's the point. And I'll leave you with this: any movie that rips off the horrific Robin Williams vehicle Toys really needs to induce some serious soul-searching on the part of everyone involved.