The Philippine Online Chronicles

These past two years have been great for the world’s most famous non-Batman fictional detective. 2009’s Sherlock Holmes, starring Robert Downey, Jr. in the titular role, shook up our perceptions of the snooty Sherlock, showing that the detective can hold his own not only in a battle of wits, but a battle of brawn. The Christmas 2009 film struck a balance between these two sides of Holmes, making for an entertaining movie for the holiday season.

The recently-released sequel stays very much the same, but that might not be a good thing.

The detective hasn’t just been busy on the silver screen. When Guy Ritchie made his first Holmes movie, the consulting detective hadn’t been relevant in years; House and the crew of the countless CSIs and NCISes of the world, detectives all, had eclipsed him in popularity. The dynamic of the exceedingly likeable Robert Downey, Jr. as Holmes and Jude Law as a refreshingly competent Watson was a breath of fresh air.

And then the BBC’s Sherlock came along, putting a savvy Holmes in modern-day London. A superb adaptation of the original stories, the series showcases a Sherlock who employs everything at his disposal to solve crime (including his not-unformidable skill in a fight) but isn’t too overblown in spectacle. But an analysis of Sherlock is a story for another article. The thing is, the ‘Holmes market’ was empty when the first movie released. With the BBC version regarded as the definitive Holmes, how does Robert Downey, Jr.’s action hero stack up?

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, a Christmas movie elsewhere in the world, was, like its predecessor, pushed back nearly two weeks in order to make room for more important movies such as Panday 2 and Segunda Mano. Director Guy Ritchie’s second stab at Holmes takes place around a year after the first movie. It is 1891, and the intrepid pair of Holmes and Watson are separated: Watson is presumably living with Mary Morstan, his fiancee, and Holmes occupies 221B Baker Street alone, continuing his work as a consulting detective. Of course, Watson is unable to resist the delightful pull of Holmes’s personality and the excitement of his work, so the good doctor joins Holmes in adventures that interrupt both his bachelor party and his honeymoon (Holmes has the courtesy to not pull any antics at the wedding ceremony itself).

The villain this time around isn’t a made-for-the-movie character like last time; now, Professor Moriarty, Holmes’s nemesis, comes into play. Jared Harris does an admirable job of playing the professor, creating an air of unassuming evil—the beauty of Moriarty is that he never gets involved in crimes, but is ever-present, pulling the strings; a spider at the center of a great web. This criminal mastermind, who had only a brief appearance previously, has manipulated the entirety of Europe this time around, aiming to instigate the Great War over 20 years early, and it is up to Holmes to stop him.

What follows is a romp throughout the Continent: Holmes and Watson travel across borders, accompanied by Madame Simza, a Romani fortune teller whose brother, against his will, works for Moriarty. Holmes’s detective skills are relegated to figuring out where to go next—the three travel to France, Germany and Switzerland—and deducing when and where to punch people.

Dogging them at every turn is Moriarty’s man, Colonel Sebastian Moran (played by Paul Anderson), the British army’s greatest marksman, which allows the movie to have even more explosions than last time. Guns of all sorts abound, from machine pistols—never mind historical accuracy—to cannons capable of blowing up several trees at a time, in slow motion. One of the more outrageous setpieces involves infiltrating, and subsequently escaping from, a gun factory of all places.

When the movie shines, it absolutely does. Robert Downey, Jr. carries the movie once again, his mile-a-minute, manic Holmes a delight to watch. The rapport between Watson and Holmes is as it should be, their banter consistently entertaining and the love (whichever kind you prefer) between them palpable. Downey’s portrayal of Holmes as the “first modern martial artist” is as fun to watch as ever, with Holmes planning the outcomes of fights a second or two before they occur.

There is no Holmes interpretation complete without Holmes’s older brother Mycroft mollycoddling the pair, and Stephen Fry, in an excellent appearance, pulls off the role spectacularly. Fry brings some genuine comedy to the movie, which, along with the Holmes-Watson banter, offsets the cheaper laughs granted by Watson’s dog, Gladstone and Robert Downey, Jr. in drag.

Holmes and Watson’s journey throughout Europe to prevent a world war leads them to a peace summit in Switzerland, right above Reichenbach Falls, a location which needs no introduction to Holmes readers and is too good a detail to spoil here for those unfamiliar. The masterful climactic sequence is thrilling: Holmes has met his true match in Moriarty, and the scene does a great job of toeing the line between Holmes the intellectual and Holmes the combat master, keeping everything hypothetical and yet very real at the same time. The confrontation between the master detective and the master criminal is what saves this movie: Moriarty’s look of shock and the look Holmes and Watson exchange at the end serves as a testament to how tangible the connections between these characters are.

In the end, it is the words of Stephen Moffat, the creator of the BBC’s Sherlock, that best apply to this other Holmes. Sherlock Holmes doesn’t have cases; he has adventures. And modern adventures inevitably involve explosions. Lots of them.