A triumph! Guy Ritchie's second Sherlock Holmes movie, A Game of Shadows is an unadulterated triumph, and an uncomplicated joy. There's no question that it's also a very silly film, but none the worse for that.
A Game of Shadows is a very loose adaptation of The Final Problem, in which the Great Detective pursues the criminal mastermind Moriarty to a showdown on the Reichenbach Falls; as such, it shares its central conceit with the latest installment in the BBC's ultra-cool "modern-dress" retelling of the canon; but it avoids the knowing postmodernism that most respectable Holmes adaptations go for these days. Instead, we get set-piece scenes involving CPR and sub-machine-guns in 1891. In fact, it's not even that important that it's a Sherlock Holmes movie; it's really the successor of 1960s period romps like Royal Flash and The Assassination Bureau.
It is, in other words, the sort of film they're not supposed to make any more.
And it's great fun.
The inherent silliness of the film is expressed throughout in Robert Downey Jr.'s portrayal of the title character: this is a vainglorious Sherlock Holmes, as flawed and fallible as he is brilliant and bold; as vocal with his complaints as with his enthusiasms, a childish ubermensch.
The zesty implausibility is also bound up in the plot, and in the way that Holmes' abilities are presented here - not just razor-sharp senses, perfect memory and stimulant-fuelled analysis, but a pretenatural facility to extrapolate beyond these rational powers and predict the next move; this provides the driving force of the story, as the hero hurries from one clue to the next, in a race that has to keep up with the villains, and ahead of the audience's suspension of disbelief.
Yet at the same time, all this absurdity has a logical integrity within the character: his cross-dressing showiness and manic cogitations, his odd neuroses and his loud complaints, are the actions of a man who probably has to behave like this to keep the incipient insanity at bay; he's also far more fallible than he lets on - he makes a whole series of mistakes in this film, each of them quite literally fatal for some member of the cast, all of them reflecting a difficulty with incorporating the human factor in his brilliant problem-solving; and this Holmes is, however absurd he purports to be, a gentleman, with a great deal more going on in his head than we're allowed to see on-screen.
The sight of a volubly insecure Sherlock Holmes bouncing along on a Shetland pony is certainly a new take on the character. It's also, perhaps more importantly, laugh-out-loud funny.
The same mix of the silly and the serious is seen in Holmes' relationship with his elder brother Mycroft (a scene-stealing Stephen Fry); the running spat between "Mikey" and "Shirley" is huge fun, another light-hearted strand of comedy; yet at the same time, this dysfunctional sibling rivalry also provides further insights into Sherlock's vulnerability and attention-seeking - bear in mind that Mycroft, several years older and many pounds heavier, has inherited their father's castle and butler, while Sherlock is rootless in rented lodgings in 221B Baker Street.
The way that Downey plays Holmes also makes for an interesting contrast with the modern-day interpretation in BBC series; in both versions, the title character appears to be deeply needy, but whereas the BBC's version is driven by a very modern psychological angst, this big-screen Holmes is in no particular pursuit of a resolution for his personal issues (whatever he implies to Watson); his erratic behaviour is simply a way to keep things interesting.
On the surface, Jude Law's Watson seems more serious: bluff, tweedy, and unhesitatingly deadly with a gun; but his straight-man dignity is stretched well beyond the point of unacknowledged absurdity - and Holmes is constantly poking against it, which produces a lot of the spark in their relationship, while also calling attention to Watson's own strengths and motivations. There's no question that this is silly stuff - the dialogue between the characters is deadpan comedy worthy of Peter Cook and/or Chris Morris - but it's also satisfyingly well-constructed as a character piece, with a Campbellian underpinning that makes the chase about more than just stopping the bad guys.
And whereas the two previous films I caught this week had female assassins as their protagonists, this is resolutely old-fashioned in its use of relatively uncomplicated male heroes. True, they're joined by Noomi Rapace's knife-throwing Romany heroine, who shows that she's the equal of the boys, but she's not the fetishized centre of attention like the female leads of Haywire and Underworld: Awakening. And now I come to think about it, there's no question of any romance between her and either of the male leads, nor does there need to be. That, in itself, is refreshingly original.
This is a romantic film, of course - but not in the sense we understand it these days; it's romantic in the sense of a swashbuckler, and in the sense of striving to escape the constraints of modern conventionality, in its vistas of untamed mountains and gaslit alleyways.
And, with that in mind, you could make a case that the real star of this movie is the confidently-realized Victorian setting, with its velvet brocade curtains and its opulent Pugin wallpapers, its tailcoated butlers and its gleaming silver teapots, and tigerskin rugs casually thrown over chairs, its unashamed empires and its Ruritanian forests; and if you think those details aren't the sort of thing that the audience should be noticing in a popcorn movie, then it's certainly the sort of thing that Sherlock Holmes would notice, especially this Holmes, and the sort of thing that will lodge in the average audience member's subconscious, to create a rich and compelling sense of place.
The action begins, of course, in London, in the full pomp of its Imperial confidence, with its polite dining rooms and raucous gambling dens, a city populated by English gentlemen and immigrants from the four corners of the British Empire; then the film moves by steam train and paddle steamer to Paris - in the days when you could still tell a man's nationality by the cut of his suit - and finds room to frame every single iconic Belle Epoque landmark on the skyline, subtly reminding the viewer that this was the age when the iconic cityscape was created; from there, the story moves to the anonymous wharves and factories and marshaling yards of a German industrial town, and finally to the inevitable climactic confrontation above a crashing waterfall in the Swiss Alps.
This is a world full of bright, bold characters, with its Romany encampments, Anarchist dens, Cossack assassins, and colourful uniforms everywhere. It's a little surprising to find that it's also a world with CPR and cosmetic surgery: while the details are light-heartedly anachronistic, a quick bit of research reveals that 1891, the year in which the film is set, has a genuine claim to be the year that both techniques went mainstream. Either the scriptwriters pulled those details out of some obscure list of things that happened in 1891, or they got very lucky indeed.
To my relief, this is also a sequel that eschews the fashionable fantasy elements that were present in its precursor. As to the array of weapons, which have attracted some comment online, I'll get on to them in a moment. The main point is that this is a vision of 1891, however stylized and excessive, that takes its cues from the unexpected and authentic reality.
It doesn't matter that there's no neo-medieval castle-hotel straddling the Reichenbach Falls in the real world, because the dramatic, anachronistic ambition of the architecture is just right for the end of the nineteenth century: designed to look like a grander re-imagining of something from an older and perhaps better age, designed so that the snow can swirl in through the carved cloister arches and the spray can leap up from the waterfall below. This is a setting that perfectly evokes the spirit and beauty and meaning of the world in which it's set - yes, meaning.
Because, in the crux of the plot, in the pivot of the mystery that Sherlock Holmes is chasing, the joy and glory of this lost past is being put up against the brutal industrial murder of the twentieth century.
In provincial Strasbourg, a quiet cathedral square is torn apart by the abrupt violence of a terrorist bomb; another atrocity ravages the dining room of a grand hotel; travelling gypsies find themselves stopped against the barbed-wire fences and uniformed guards of the modern state: yet this is a world where there are still open roads through the perfect forests and across the perfect mountains, and where there are still heroes, committed to defending all that's good in it. When one of those heroes describes the plot as a "threat to Western civilization", it's a cliché - yet, at the same time, fantastically, it actually means something in this movie.
And in the sequence where the real threat is revealed, those same heroes are put to flight by the indiscriminate violence of modern war: machine-guns, heavy artillery, and a scene of slaughter out of August 1914. It's the sort of action sequence that communicates a visceral impact to the audience, and there's no question that it's played for thrills - big guns are sexy, the film seems to say, as it fetishizes the mechanical process that it takes to fire one, and portrays the impact in stylized slow-motion; but it also displays in graphic detail the deadly reality of the threat that the heroes are fighting against.
In other words, this is a film that sets out to entertain the audience with set-piece action scenes, but in stark contrast to Underworld: Awakening, it somehow manages to use its own crowd-pleasing instincts to tell a fantastic story, too.
This is where the guns come in: the Mauser semi-automatic pistol is the perfect symbol of the devastating firepower that industrial technology can give to a half-trained man, and the point is made on-screen in a way that's not exactly subtle. True, history records that it was designed in 1893, but that's a forgivable anachronism, and within the frame of the movie, it's easy enough to imagine that the designers took a job in Oberndorf after the violent closure of the fictional Meinhart arms factory in nearby Heilbronn. In the real world, the comparable Borchardt seems to have been looking for a manufacturer in 1891, but perhaps the production team felt that this unusual weapon looked a little too sci-fi for the setting?
There's also a sub-machine-gun that shows up in one scene, but this is far less outrageous than it seems - it closely resembles the Madsen family of lightweight machine guns and automatic rifles from Denmark, prototyped in the 1880s and put into front-line use by 1896; the brass water-cooling jacket on the barrel looks more like it belongs on a Maxim gun, but that's certainly right for the period, and there are some references indicating that water-cooled variants of the Madsen existed, so even this may be authentic. Even if the exact combination of design details is unique to the movie, the concept and technology are just right.
In short, the unexpectedly modern firepower that shows up in this movie represents the real cutting edge of 1891. But, devastating as this rapid-fire barbarism is, naive as the hands that wield it might be, it's only part of a wider, more profoundly human threat: and it has, at the back and centre of it, the villainous intent of Professor James Moriarty.
Moriarty is a monster of unfettered sadism prowling behind the mask of a respectable society figure, channeling his aggression through the fashionable sport of boxing, espousing a mathematical nihilism that expresses contempt for the old order... but which really only serves to disguise and legitimize his real motivation - a twisted pleasure in the suffering of others; he's the perfect embodiment of modern villainy. In contrast with the BBC adaptation, this is a Moriarty who's clearly differentiated from Holmes - they're as different as a waltz and a machine-gun nest - and the film is none the worse for it.
In other words, this is a film that makes truly splendid use of its magnificent setting - not to comment on society, not to argue about right and wrong, but to make it the spring of the plot; it's the perfect example of "show, don't tell".
Another particularly classy detail was the use of music in this film - one terrorist bombing is choreographed to the climax of Mozart's Don Giovanni; a gruesome torture is set to Schubert'sTrout; and everyone dances a Strauss waltz where a Strauss waltz should be danced. There's also an extended borrowing from Ennio Morricone, which is used for comical effect, but makes a remarkably intelligent connection between the displaced outcasts of the older world that's under threat in this film and the socialist revolutionaries of the modern age - and I think I heard a bit of Wagner buried just where a bit of Wagner should be buried: the first notes of Siegfrieds Trauermarsch reverberate amid the harsh noise of mechanical battle as a German gun-crew fire the first awful salvo of industrial war: a leitmotiv that suggests the coming, inevitable Gotterdamerüng of World War I.
If, as some of the PR makes out, this was largely a movie that Guy Ritchie and and Robert Downey Jr. improvised during the filming process, then it's a spectacular triumph. And if what they did was strip an intelligent script down to the Maxim-gun essentials and amp up the Holywood colour, then it's no worse for that, either.
So, to sum up: this is a flawless, brilliant, wonderful film, gorgeous to look at and based around a plot that's driven by the fundamental tensions of human civilization - and that achieves it all with an easy, populist and effortless unpretentiousness. It may be the greatest popcorn movie ever made.
Yes, it really is that good. And if you can't see that, you need to push your inner Moriarty off a waterfall.
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