Director: Guy Ritchie
Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, Noomie Rapace, Jared Harris, Stephen Fry
Review: 3 stars (of five)
The key flaw in Guy Ritchie’s first Holmes film was that the emphasis on action/comedy and hyperactive, modern camera techniques completely jarred with the source material. If you want to make this kind of movie, I said at the time, then why misuse Sherlock Holmes in the process? Badmouth’s 2009 review of that movie used the words “pathetic desecration.” But after the success of the entertaining first installment, the sequel’s obligation is to be faithful to its predecessor, not to Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories. This time out, the question is, do Ritchie, Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law and company up the ante on being loud, funny, violent and intriguing—while still producing a watchable film.
They do. The film delivers more of what was likable in the first film, which is quick action, high stakes, the humorous interaction Downey had with Law and Rachel McAdams (here in a brief, unresolved cameo) and things exploding frequently. The script again relies on terrorism (but this time with a common-criminal underpinning), but delivers a better bad guy by putting a version of Holmes arch-foe Moriarty onscreen, and not wasting our time with the cultish madness that saddled Mark Strong’s villainous turn in the original. 
In this flick, Moriarty is just in it for the money and the challenge. His fiendish plans will engulf Europe in all-out war (“a world war,” Holmes realizes breathlessly) and make him ridiculously wealthy (wealthier, one presumes).
Along with Holmes’ mad pursuit of Moriarty’s insane scheme, he is again frustrating his erstwhile partner, Dr. Watson, as the latter prepares to get married. If you noticed a mild gay subtext in the relationship between the two men in the first film, you’ll see that this one layers it on triple-thick. As Holmes consistently sneers at or actively undermines Watson’s nuptials, one would wonder how they could even remain friends were it not played for high comedy in a far-from-realistic film. The point is the chemistry, the friction between the two men, and Downey and Law nail that perfectly.
A principle drawback is that the plot is difficult to follow. The film has tremendous forward momentum, which tends to carry us past the stretches in which we’re not sure what leads Holmes is following or how it all adds up. Ritchie spends a lot more time blowing things up than on building airtight coherence into the story. That’s another drawback–the film relies on all the tricks of the first, from its humor to Ritchie’s slow-mo superzoom action technique, to such a degree that it’s possible that a viewer will find the whole film a tedious retread. Odds are, though, that the hyperactive chaos will prevent you from thinking about that until after the credits roll and you’ve stumbled out into the real world.
The film’s climactic battle between Holmes and Moriarty takes place at Reichenbach Falls, in Switzerland, a momentous location for anyone passingly familiar with the Holmes canon. This last physical battle between two cerebral opponents is well-handled here, and interlaced with a fairly nonsensical climax to the villain’s actual scheme, provided by Watson and an attractive, if underdeveloped, gypsy who has tagged along through most of the film.
The review of this film boils down to what can be said for nearly all well-made sequels: If you liked the first movie, this is more of the same, with sufficient freshness. If you didn’t like it the first time, though, this ain’t gonna change your mind.
