I enjoyed watching the new film ‘Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows’ at the cinema, but I also had the sense that, somewhere close by, there was a much better film. Not a different film but a better execution of this one.
The most striking sequence in the film is a chase through the woods as Holmes and his party make their escape from the armaments factory. In slow motion, so the people are just moving and we can track the path of the bullets, it could be a scene from a wuxia movie, a greyed out northern forest replacing the bamboo groves of China. The scenes where Holmes and Moriarty anticipate the moves they will make in combat could have come from the same movie.
And it’s not that this is not an authentic Holmes. There is plenty of warrant in the original stories for the disguises, the theatricality, the hyper-activity and instability. Is there a deliberate echo of Heath Ledger’s Joker in Downey’s smudged make-up at the end of the fight on the train?