“Be careful what you fish for!”
Swift shot: Frantically paced, clever, fun, with an imaginative script. Holmes and Watson find themselves married to their work, in more ways than one, as they match wits with the fiendishly calculating Professor James Moriarty (Jared Harris) across Europe. Guy Ritchie turns in another winner this time with witty scribes Keiran and Michele Mulroney delivering an action-packed story.
The year is 1891, Europe is on the brink of a global war, anarchists and nationalists are juxtaposed as the nations amass their forces preparing for a dreadful, technological slaughter. Everyone else sees the rampant bombings of the occupiers, oops, I mean anarchists as solely anti-government loons hell bent on tearing down the establishment, but Holmes (Downey Jr.) knows better. It doesn’t take him long to convince his astute mate, Watson (Law) that someone, a well-connected character, Moriarty may be pulling all the spiders webs, but to what end?
It isn’t like Watson wants to run around on another potentially perilous adventure with Holmes, especially considering he is finally going to wear the shackles of horrible matrimony, get married, rather. Kelly Reilly reprises her role as Mary, soon to be Mrs. Mary Watson, unless Holmes manages to massacre her wedded bliss. On a wonderfully shot train sequence, with close-quarters combat and all manner of ingenuity to escape death, she gets her chance to show she is worthy to marry a veteran of the Afghanistan campaign.
Mary is dispatched to let another feisty feminine join the game, Noomi Rapace (fresh off her fiery performance as Libeth Salander) assumes the role of gypsy Madam Simza, who is just as much a badass as Salander . . . she was well cast! When we first meet her character, she is dealing with a pesky Cossack who must have cockroach DNA! She is concerned because her brother, a dedicated anarchist, has gone missing and sent her a mysterious note. That is how she makes Holmes’ acquaintance.
Meanwhile, Holmes’ older brother, Mycroft (clearly the Holmes parents were sadists) unveiled by the wonderfully talented Stephen Fry, is working behind the scenes to determine if his troubled kid brother is onto something real, can all these bombings across the globe somehow be connected?
Well, here is where the film fell a bit, for someone as genius as the Professor, and for someone who never leaves loose ends, he sure left enough to have Holmes very quickly surmise he was the Soros, I mean, puppet-master behind the violence and protests.
It was all a little too convenient, really. But, I didn’t mind, because this film was every bit as much an action flick as it’s older brother from last Christmas. Getting to the good bits might have been less cerebral than most people preferred, but I heard a few people say that the original film was “boring” – so maybe the writers decided to trim some fat to get to the action. I won’t fault them for that, but remember, this is a Holmes film – it needs to be incredibly clever . . . it needs to dazzle with brilliance, not baffle with the typical Hollywood bullshit. I don’t know if it was a puzzler per say.
Still, there will be surprises, you do have to pay attention, and there are things for you to try and unravel – you may find yourself wanting to watch it again, right away, just to see if you missed anything, but in the end, the great reason for Moriarty’s game left me wanting something a bit less derivative.
