Starring: Robert Downey Jnr, Jude Law, Noomi Rapace, Jared Harris Director: Guy Ritchie Category: IIA Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows begins - and ends - with Dr Watson (Jude Law) seated in his well-appointed study, typing out his recollections of his latest adventure with his friend. Quaint scenes to bookend what prove to be a bombastic action thriller, but this could also be Guy Ritchie's way of setting out the raison d'?tre of his franchise: just as the viewer may interpret what lies between as Holmes' lieutenant's own refashioning of events, A Game of Shadows continues the director's reimagining of Arthur Conan Doyle's 19th century detective stories for 21st century audiences as the Baker Street duo crawl the continent, guns literally blazing, to, as Holmes proclaims, 'prevent the collapse of Western civilisation'. Purist aficionados of Conan Doyle will again decry Ritchie's revisionist take on their heroes. The loud explosions and action-heavy set pieces that defined the first film from 2009 - including the slow-motion sequences in which the director drew upon his earlier modern-day heist flicks - are still in abundance, with scenes in which Holmes (Robert Downey Jnr) beats the living daylights out of his adversaries with martial arts moves and Watson sprays villains with a prototype machine gun. This time they contend with a nemesis - James Moriarty (Jared Harris), a Conan Doyle character Ritchie reworked here - hell-bent on profiting from a terrorist campaign designed to ignite a war in Europe. To accuse Ritchie of sacrilege, however, is akin to chasing shadows: just as Conan Doyle's work served to titillate readers with intrigue in his day, Ritchie's take on Sherlock Holmes' legacy does the same for modern viewers - albeit with the knowing irony such capers couldn't really do without today. While depicting Britain as emerging into a mechanised modernity - like a Victorian-era James Bond, Holmes is seen playing with new contraptions such as cars while the underground railway nears completion outside his apartment - A Game of Shadows could be seen as an interpretation of how the modern world began to go awry as industrialisation led to the commercialisation of war. What undermines A Game of Shadows is how the plot is nearly rendered irrelevant - the film dissolves into a speeding train of individual melees, whether between the good guys (Holmes and Watson joined by a gypsy fortune-teller, played by Noomi Rapace, above, with Downey, left, and Law) and the thugs or between Holmes and Watson themselves. The interactions of the latter category - with game turns from Downey and Law - hold this film together, as Ritchie lifts the bromance of the previous instalment into the homoerotic stratosphere: where there was once innuendo, there's now explicit sexual frisson as Holmes sulks over and (inadvertently) torpedoes his friend's wedding and honeymoon. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows opens today
