Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

Okay, okay, okay. I decided I’d make an effort to lighten up after my review of the first in this series. Not that I still don’t hate, hate, hate that movie. Just that I would try to go into this one deliberately not seeing the hero as Sherlock Holmes, and that guy by his side as not Doctor Watson. Hard, but not impossible, I told myself. Could it work?

I don’t really know, because it didn’t really matter. Holmes or no Holmes, this is a stupid movie, just like the first one. From the very first stupid fight to the very last stupid fight, it sucked, big time. I guess I’m really in the minority (else why would they keep staging action scenes like this?) but to me, this awful technique of alternating shots of suuuuuuppppeeeeerrrr sloooooowwwwww moooooootioooooon with shots that jerk by like lightning ruin an action scene, they don’t enhance it. So here we have our heroes fleeing though a forest while being attacked by mortar shells, and when one hits everything just sort of freezes as bodies and smoke and a million wood chips from shattered trees drift slowly through the air. Then all at once they jerk forward at about 10X normal speed, and then they slow down again. Why? Why, why, why? Can anyone tell me how this makes it more exciting? It literally brings everything to a dead stop while we get to admire the detail of the SFX director’s art. Only we’ve seen this exact same thing a thousand times by now. It is boring, boring, boring. The whole movie is boring.

I never would have seen this one at all except for it being Noomi Rapace’s first starring role in a big Hollywood film, post-Lisbeth Salander. I had intended to wait for the DVD, but I weakened, and blew $3.50 for me and $3.50 for Lee (we have a very cheap theater in our neighborhood), and so another seven dollars went down the drain. How did she do? Very well, I thought, with the little they gave her to do. She still has the intensity, that strong face with the cheekbones and the eyebrows. When she’s on the screen, she’s what I’m looking at. She fit the part of a wild gypsy woman right down to her blonde Swedish-Icelandic hair roots (ha!). Now I’m eager to see her in another good film, and my hopes are pinned on one of the big summer blockbusters that might actually be good: the lead role in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, due out in June. After that she’s lined up for three more big movies with directors like Brain de Palma and Catherine Hardwicke. I’ve got my fingers crossed.