The first is that studio executives and/or director and writers obviously think that after a generation of the violence in video games and blockbuster movies, the old literary institutions like curiosity, innocence, mystery and wonder simply aren’t enough to entertain us anymore.
We saw it last year with ”Alice in Wonderland”, where Disney and Tim Burton turned a jaunty little tale about an adventurous young girl skipping through gardens with fantasy creatures and turned into Lord of the Rings for moppets, complete with a climactic fight scene, giant monster and armies clashing on the battlefield.
Similarly, you’ll wonder if Sir Arthur Conan Doyle might be turning in his grave if he could see how his most beloved creation has been recast for modern audiences. The gentleman who used reason and deduction and whom rarely picked up a gun or threw a fist is portrayed in an action thriller crammed with gigantic explosions and bone crunching fistfights. The news that Guy Ritchie was helming the big screen outing of literature’s most famous detective seemed strange at the time but he was the perfect choice for a period buddy action comedy.
The second interesting aspect is the paradox of our love of violence in movies to begin with. Holmes’ nemesis Moriarty’s (Harris) scheme is to positioning himself to own most of the industrial war-fighting supply when the inevitable happens and Europe descends into chaos. As history’s first global arms dealer, Moriarty is portrayed as the villain because weapons are bad and evil.
The dichotomy is when the very same film invites us to gasp at the thrill of how cool guns and weapons can be. Ritchie’s most visually inventive sequence has Holmes (Downey Jr), Watson (Law), gypsy Simza (Rapace) and her gang running through a forest while German troops unleash everything from rifles to mounted cannons on them.
Holmes and Watson square off against Professor Moriarty (Jared Harris), who has cooked up a scheme to pit various European nations against one another in the hope of profiting from the demand for weapons.
A Gypsy fortuneteller, played by Noomi Rapace, tags along. Rachel McAdams, Holmes' love interest in the first film, makes a brief appearance. Guy Ritchie once again directs, turning Arthur Conan Doyle's classic literary character into just another Hollywood action hero.
This is Sherlock Holmes 2.0—more of the same explosions and Holmes-Watson banter as the first film, just bigger and louder.
Holmes is supposed to be really smart, distinguishing him from every other crime fighter; now, thanks to Hollywood, his brain is secondary. So the flick-o-meter gives Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows three out of five.
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